Tax Notes is out with a new piece that makes the case for expanding the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT).  The article quotes exclusively from individuals who would like to see the tax applied to a broader base of income.  Absent is anybody from the business community, which is uniformly opposed to these tax hikes.

Instead, the article comes across as an advocacy piece highlighting people long opposed to the pass-through structure as a whole.  The article starts off:

President Biden has proposed addressing a long-perceived flaw with the net investment income tax, but as with his predecessors, political considerations …

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Still more evidence the tax hikes included in the Build Back Better Act would make inflation worse.  As noted by Bruce Thompson in the Washington Examiner, a “Working Paper” from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows how tax hikes on businesses result in higher prices for consumers.

The study found that increases in corporate tax rates are passed on to consumers, in part, in the form of higher prices.  Here’s the key conclusion from the write-up:

This paper provides evidence that corporate taxes impact retail product prices, and that a significant portion of corporate tax incidence falls on consumers…. …

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At a roundtable event on Thursday, President Biden unveiled a new White House report that touts a “small business boom,” and attributes this success to his administration’s economic strategy.

The timing of the event was a bit odd – the Commerce Department had just released its first quarter GDP estimates, showing the economy shrank by 1.4 percent, and businesses continue to face rampant inflation, job shortages, and supply chain disruptions. So what’s this “boom” the President is bragging about?

In framing its success, the White House report leans heavily on 2021 job figures:

Under the Biden-Harris Administration, small businesses are …

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The progressive case for raising taxes is premised upon two arguments – 1) income shares are increasingly concentrated at the top and 2) the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced taxes for the wealthy and corporations at the expense of everybody else.

The first premise is simply wrong, as demonstrated most recently by new research by Phillip Magness and Vincent Geloso.  This paper lands on top of a growing pile of analyses (see here, here, here, and here) showing that the work of French economists Piketty and Saez is deeply flawed and should not be …

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