Republicans are threatening to default on the US national debt. Don’t believe them

theguardian.com:

P resident Biden is proposing to trim the federal budget deficit by close to $3tn over the next 10 years. He was an FDR-like spender in the first two years of his presidency. Has he now turned into a Calvin Coolidge skinflint?

Neither. He’s a cunning political operator.

Biden knows that he – along with his three immediate predecessors (Trump, Obama and George W Bush) – have spent gobs of money. In addition, Bush and Trump cut taxes on the rich and on corporations.

Not surprisingly, the national debt has soared. It’s not so much an economic problem as a political one. The huge debt is giving Republicans a big, fat target.

House Republicans are planning to stage theater-of-the-absurd pyrotechnics – refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Which means that at some point this summer, Biden’s treasury department will say that the nation is within days (or hours) of defaulting on its bills. A default would be catastrophic.

To counter this, Biden is planning his own pyrotechnics.

In the budget released this week, he’s proposing a “billionaire minimum tax” that would require wealthy American households worth more than $100m to pay at least 20% of their incomes in taxes (most middle-class Americans pay about 30%). Plus, they’d have to pay 20% a year on unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks, which can accumulate value for years but are taxed only when they are sold (and not even then, if left to their heirs).

Here’s the important thing: the tax would apply only to the top one-100th of 1% of American households. Over half of the revenue would come from those worth more than $1bn.

Biden is proposing additional tax hikes on the wealthy: reversing the Trump tax cut by raising the top tax rate to 39.6% from 37%,