Your 401(k) Is Toast if Biden Attacks 'Big Oil'
President Joe Biden’s battle against “Big Oil” may harm the average American’s retirement savings.
During his Feb. 7 State of the Union address, Biden announced his administration’s plan to quadruple the tax on corporate buyback investments from 1 percent to 4 percent.
The president lambasted large oil and gas companies for choosing to use their profits to buyback their own stocks, rather than increase their production output.
“Last year, they made $200 billion in the midst of a global energy crisis. I think it’s outrageous,” Biden said.
“They invested too little of that profit to increase domestic production … Instead, they used those record profits to buy back their own stock, rewarding their CEOs and shareholders.”
The president then promised to increase other taxes on major corporations.
Despite what was said, however, it appears that the majority of these taxes won’t actually be taken on by the corporations themselves.
Rather, those taxes will be passed onto consumers through various means, including higher prices for customers and lower wages for workers.
(The following interview was first included in an exclusive report for The Western Journal’s subscribers. The report investigated many of the claims made during Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and found that many of the president’s promises to lower day-to-day costs for everyday Americans would actually result in the opposite. Consider subscribing to The Western Journal to see more content like this).
“Roughly 70 percent of the corporate income tax is paid by workers in lower wages. So, when somebody says, ‘I’m going to raise $100 billion from companies,’ that’s $70 billion coming out of the pockets of workers, who will either have lower wages than they otherwise would or not have a job at all,” Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, told The Western Journal.
According to Norquist, Biden’s corporate buyback tax will ultimately harm the stock market by preventing major corporations from investing in it.
As a result, share prices will be reduced, the stock market will lose money and the retirement equity of a majority of Americans will be harmed.
“One of the reasons Biden really doesn’t understand the importance of share prices … is that he’s so old that he remembers in the 1960s, 10 percent of Americans owned shares of stock directly,” Norquist said.
“Today, it’s over 60 percent because of IRAs and 401(k)s and defined contribution pensions,” he said.
So, corporate taxes may very well hurt the average American by reducing wages, raising prices and “trashing” his or her life savings.
“That is their life savings that he’s trashing. He’s going out there with a baseball bat and going through and breaking people’s life savings and making them poorer when they retire.”
“And he acts as if, ‘Oh, I’m not taxing you. I’m not hurting you. I’m taxing big corporations 1 percent … OK, 4 percent.’”
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