President Biden speaks to the International Association of Firefighters at a conference in Washington on March 6, 2023.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
President Biden speaks to the International Association of Firefighters at a conference in Washington on March 6, 2023.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
President Biden is proposing to raise taxes on people earning more than $400,000 to extend Medicare for another 25 years, highlighting a key element of his budget proposal that the White House will release in full. enough on Thursday.
This year, the president’s budget – a policy document often overlooked by Congress, the body that holds the spending power – comes before the deadline for raising the US debt ceiling.
House Republicans have said they will not raise the debt limit without significantly cutting federal spending. Democrats, including Biden, have accused Republicans of wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, two major sources of federal spending.
Biden published a op-ed inside New York Times on Tuesday made a proposal to invest in a Medicare trust fund so the plan could stay solvent into the 2050s, a plan that would raise the Medicare tax rate to 5% from 3.8% for those who earns more than $400,000 a year.
He also proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for more prescription drugs and use the savings from that to keep the program going. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed last year, allows the program to negotiate prices for some drugs.
“Decreasing drug prices while expanding Medicare’s ability to pay certainly makes a lot more sense than cutting subsidies,” Biden wrote in the Times, “These are sensible changes that I believe the vast majority of number of Americans will support.”
Biden said Medicare is a “solid guarantee” for retired Americans and said his proposals are “reasonable changes” that most people would support.
recent voting shows that people in the United States are divided on how to best handle the budget deficit.
In an NPR poll last month, 7 out of 10 people, including a majority of Republicans, said they want their representatives to compromise to find solutions when it comes to budgets. But half of the respondents said they would prefer the solution to cut most programs and services, and 46% said they would like to see an increase in taxes and fees.
Three-quarters of Republicans say they want cuts to programs and services, but Republicans in Congress have voiced that cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security are “off the table.“
