Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb acknowledged that enacting all of the Democrats’ sweeping policy visions would require Democrats to raise taxes on the middle class rather than relying on tax increases on the rich.
“If we want to propose a lot of new spending and adventurous new government programs in our party, we have to have the confidence to ask … the middle class and people like that to contribute to it. And I think that’s … what we’re missing right now,” Lamb, a Democrat representing a swing district northwest of Pittsburgh, said last week.
His comments are notable given many Democrats’ argument that their original $3.5 trillion social spending bill proposal, which has since been scaled down to $1.75 trillion, could be paid for without raising taxes on the middle class. One of President Joe Biden’s campaign promises was to not raise taxes on those with an annual income less than $400,000.
Lamb, who in August joined a crowded field seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate in 2022, made the comment at a virtual meet-and-greet with northwestern Pennsylvania Democrats on Oct. 27.
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An attendee asked Lamb what he thought of a flat tax. Lamb responded that he did not think a flat tax would work on the federal level because it would not raise enough money to run the government. He then got into talking about Democratic efforts to make the wealthiest individuals pay their “fair share.”
“Some of the focus on the billionaires and the ultra-wealthy that people are putting in the news right now — it’s fine, it’s valid, it’s not enough to fund everything we want to do,” Lamb said. “So, it’s a little bit of a convenient escape hatch for some Democrats, honestly, to say, ‘Oh we can just, you know, raise taxes on billionaires.’ Well, the combined cost of everything that Democrats are proposing to do right now goes far beyond what billionaires are ever going to realistically pay.”
Lamb suggested that a lack of middle-class tax increases in major spending legislation being crafted by Congress could signal that top Democrats know that many sweeping programs cannot be paid for without middle-class tax hikes — and that funding a limited number of successful programs could set the stage for hikes down the road.
“To a certain extent, it reflects a little bit of a lack of confidence among our leadership that you really can do all of these different things that they promised at once. And it might caution for doing a few things extremely well, selling the public and convincing the public on the ability to do them well, so that it is easier in the future to get them to trust and invest in the government that … is supposed to be serving them,” Lamb said.
While campaigning in 2018, Lamb criticized the 2017 Republican tax cut bill but said that he wanted to keep middle-class taxes where they were. He also had a campaign ad saying he supported a middle-class tax cut.
Lamb’s campaign, though, signaled that his recent comments should not be taken as an endorsement of increasing taxes on the middle class.
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“Conor Lamb has not proposed and would not vote for a tax increase on the middle class. In fact, this year he voted for the largest middle-class tax cut in a generation, the Child Tax Credit, which every single House Republican voted against,” Lamb Campaign Manager Abby Nassif-Murphy said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
The Joint Committee on Taxation on Thursday found that House Democrats’ scaled-back $1.75 trillion Build Back Better legislation would raise $1.5 trillion in taxes over 10 years through changes to the corporate and international tax code, a surtax on those earning more than $10 million per year, and other provisions. That is not a full picture of the budgetary impact of the bill, though, and does not include estimates of revenue from increased IRS enforcement or savings from drug pricing provisions.
