A new economic report lambasting President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar infrastructure agenda was shoved under the rug by the ABC, CBS and NBC evening networks. The Tax Foundation released a new analysis March 31 on Biden’s plan headlined “President Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Raises Taxes on U.S. Production.”
The report summarized that “[t]he proposal’s tax increases on corporations are among the most harmful options to pay for the increased spending.” The report continued: “While the President’s plan emphasizes making goods in America, the tax increases will raise the cost of production in the U.S, erode American competitiveness, and slow our economic recovery.”
ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News ignored the report entirely during their March 31, April 1, April 2 and April 5 evening broadcasts. The Big Three reported on Biden’s infrastructure proposal March 31, while ignoring the Tax Foundation’s damning analysis.
The Big Three have been true to form by protecting Biden from news coverage that could hinder his economic agenda.
The Tax Foundation’s report accused the Biden plan of relying on “mistaken assumptions” about taxation: “The tax proposals in the American Jobs Plan (Biden infrastructure plan) rely on mistaken assumptions about how corporate taxes work, how corporations respond, and how workers are affected.”
Biden has planned to hike the federal corporate tax rate from “21 percent to 28 percent and tighten inversion regulations.” The Tax Foundation tweeted March 17 that “[t]he corporate income tax is the most harmful tax for economic growth.” But the Tax Foundation highlighted a number of other key facts that undercut the radical thinking behind Biden’s plans to hike taxes, which the Big Three didn’t consider worth bringing up. The following conclusions from the Tax Foundation were especially revealing:
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“Workers across the income scale would bear much of the tax increase. For example, the bottom 20 percent of earners would on average see a 1.5 percent drop in after-tax income in the long run.”
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“An increase in the federal corporate tax rate to 28 percent would raise the U.S. federal-state combined tax rate to 32.34 percent, higher than every country in the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], the G7, and all our major trade partners and competitors including China. This would harm U.S. economic competitiveness and diminish our role in the world.”
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“Raising the federal corporate tax rate 7 percentage points would reduce the after-tax rate of return on corporate investment in America, resulting in less investment, less productivity, fewer jobs, and lower wages.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818-460-7477), CBS News (212-975-3247) and NBC News (212- 664-6192) and demand they stop ignoring the Tax Foundation’s analysis on Biden’s massive infrastructure plan and report its findings.
NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck and MRC News Analyst Nicholas Fondacaro contributed to this report.