Malinowski flipped his suburban district to the Democrats in 2018 on a campaign of fiscal responsibility, an issue once dominated by Republicans that was abandoned in the Trump era. His district contains the eighth-highest percentage in the country of taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $500,000 or more, about 7%.
Representative Tom Suozzi’s district ranks sixth in the nation by that same measure. But for the New York Democrat, addressing income inequality is a selling point.
His Long Island constituency includes parts of Queens—abutting the district held by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist. But other sections, like his home town of Glen Cove, also have a 12-bedroom mansion listed for sale at $19.9 million.
“I’m not a soak-the-rich type of person, but I’m a fairness person,” Suozzi said. “The pandemic has been cruelly uneven. I don’t want to see the solution of our income inequality be done solely through a redistribution method. But it’s a piece of the answer.”
Income inequality, one of the broader issues Biden says his bill will address, was on the rise long before the coronavirus pandemic. Since President Bill Clinton’s tax law in 1993, median incomes have increased 26% in real dollars, but those in the top 5% have seen their incomes go up 48%, according to the Census Bureau. Incomes in the bottom 10% have risen only 19%.
“It’s time to update some of our prior assumptions on tax policy,” said Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “We still imagine that we’re living at the height of the Reagan Revolution, and it was a long time ago.”
No Room For Error
In 1993, Clinton pushed through a budget that contained a $246 billion tax increase—about $450 billion in today’s dollars. And it hit roughly the same taxpayers that Biden is targeting. Clinton’s 39.6% top rate applied to joint returns of more than $250,000, or $455,000 today.
But he lost 46 Democratic votes when the bill passed the House, and it took Vice President Al Gore to break a tie in the Senate.
Now, Biden has less room to maneuver. His Democratic Party controls the House with 218 seats to Republicans’ 212, and five vacancies. If the vote were held today, Biden could afford to lose only three Democratic votes in the House—and none in the Senate—or his tax plan is doomed. And more defections could spell trouble for the 2022 midterms, when presidents typically see their House majority slip away.
But after losing the majority in the U.S. House in every congressional election from 2010 to 2016—largely to Tea Party Republicans using tax and spending issues as a proxy for larger cultural themes—Democrats took control in 2018, flipping several affluent suburban districts along the way.
“Things have changed in terms of more Democrats being willing to raise taxes, and that’s because there are fewer moderate Democrats remaining in Congress,” said former Representative Dan Lipinski, who lost his 2020 primary to a more progressive challenger. “The ideological battles within the Democratic Party have been kept to a minimum so far, but at some point I think that’s all going to come out.”