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Money blog: Cost of £7 pint broken down - how much is tax and profit?

The cost of draught lager has gone up nearly 30% since January 2019, according to the Office for National Statistics. Read this and more in the Money blog, your place for personal finance news. Leave a comment on stories we've covered, or a question for our experts, in the form below.

Thursday 4 April 2024 20:15, UK

• British Savings Bonds announced in the budget go on sale - but experts aren't convinced
• What makes up the cost of a £6 pint - and how much is profit?
• How to make your money work harder while it's sat in your current account
• How much will your take-home pay increase this month with NI cut? Use our calculator
• 'Are they going to go around sniffing people?' Big Issue founder says government has 'lost the plot' over homelessness plan
• Eight big price hikes this week - and six boosts to Britons' pockets
• All the places kids can eat cheap or free this Easter

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Tens of thousands of people are facing crippling tax demands from HMRC for taxes their employers failed to pay. 

It's a campaign that has driven people to the brink of bankruptcy and devastated families.

At least 23 victims have taken - or attempted to take - their own lives.

For the first time, two people who tried to end their lives have shared their story with Sky News.

The following article contains references to suicide that readers may find distressing.

We've all found ourselves stuck on a delayed train and wished we'd chosen any other route to get home. You might even be on one right now.

Well, thanks to a new study you can at least take note of routes you might want to avoid.

It has listed the worst offending companies on the UK's rail network by looking at official data from the Office of Rail and Road between January 2021 and September 2023.

It looked at trains that were cancelled or delayed by 15 minutes or more during that time period.

The research found Avanti West Coast had 15.36% of its services delayed or cancelled. 

The study's second worst offender, with 12.32% of all trains either cancelled or seriously late, is Grand Central Rail . 

And  CrossCountry was the third least reliable operator, with 12.26% of trains arriving 15 minutes or more late, or being cancelled altogether. 

Axel Hernborg, founder of Tripplo , which conducted the study, said: " It's no secret that the UK's rail network is a far shout from those within mainland Europe in terms of efficiency and reliability, and these findings simply underscore that."

Look at the table below for the full list of the 10 least reliable train operators, as ranked by the travel website. The column on the right shows the number of minutes customers lost in delays.

By Faith Ridler, news reporter

At the start of the year, I set myself what felt like an impossible challenge - to make enough cash to finally go on my dream holiday to Japan – all through side hustles.

After a few false starts – and a lot of cat sitting – I discovered Vinted, a second-hand selling app which had the very convenient side effect of helping me declutter my very tiny London flat.

I set up my account at the very end of January, listing a few items that were spilling out of my wardrobe – jackets, dresses and shoes I hadn’t worn once since purchasing them.

I also listed some craft supplies that had become a hobby graveyard on my cluttered desk during COVID lockdowns.

To my surprise, pretty much everything sold.

And to date, I've made the hefty sum of around £1,500. 

This was more than enough for my flight to Japan, a new suitcase, and a hotel for my arrival in Tokyo this summer.

Here are the tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way…

Do your research

The biggest piece of advice I could give you if you’re thinking about selling on Vinted is to make sure you know the value of what you're selling.

I was surprised to find through my own selling experience that some brands hold their value much better than others. 

For example, a dress I bought for £40 from a brand called Louche sold (after some weeks) for only £4.

On the other hand, a Lucy & Yak T-shirt I bought for £30 sold used for £20.

You may ask, how do I know what something is worth?

The best way to investigate this is to check what other people are doing on the app. That way, you don’t list things too cheaply and end up losing out.

Other items I found hold their value are Nintendo Switch games, some of which I sold on for face value after completing a playthrough myself.

An important note – make sure you check which items you can sell through Vinted before listing. If you have listings deleted too often, you can get your account banned. You can find this information through the app itself.

No printer? InPost lockers are your friend

A key element of Vinted selling is physically posting the items, which can become a bit of a headache if you don’t know the ins and outs of the app.

I fell victim to the many shipping options at the start of my selling journey – until a kind friend mentioned you can actually switch off methods not available in your area in the Postage tab of Settings.

My advice would be to have a good look at what you can offer for delivery, and make sure those are the only options available for people buying items through your page.

If – like me – you don’t have a printer, you can turn off every option but InPost lockers.

These are postal lockers you simply need to scan a QR code to open and leave the parcel inside.

No label, no problem.

Learn how to haggle

This was something that shocked me about the app.

Although you set a price for your items, almost everybody will try to haggle the price down.

You can ask for people not to send offers in the description of the items, but I’ve had very limited success with that method.

What I find works best is to list the item for slightly more than you would accept, and just let people haggle down. You're still earning the best price, and the buyer goes away with a "deal".

Everybody wins.

Taxes and Vinted

When it comes to earning money through any method, you always have to consider the tax ramifications.

However, as Vinted explains clearly on its website , if the money you make on the app over a year is less than what you paid for the items initially, you pay no tax.

It adds: "The only time that an individual item might be taxable is when you sell it for more than £6,000 and there is a profit from the sale.

"Even then, you can use your capital gain tax-free allowance (which is £3,000) to reduce this profit."

Essentially, if, like me, you're simply decluttering your way to Japan, you're very unlikely to find yourself crossing paths with HMRC.

Trade groups have warned of higher food prices and empty supermarket shelves because of new post-Brexit border fees being introduced this month.

A maximum charge of £145 will apply on imports of plant and animal products, such as cheese and fish, entering the UK through the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel from 30 April.

The fees are intended to cover the cost of operating new border control posts required after Brexit, and will not apply to goods brought into the UK for personal use, the government said.

But importers warned the new charges could lead to higher prices for consumers.

Read more here ...

Ted Baker is the latest in a string of high-street giants to call in administrators in recent years. 

But how does it affect you? 

Let's use Ted Baker as an example. 

Purchases and returns

You can still purchase online or walk into a Ted Baker shop and buy items, but you could run into trouble returning them. 

If the retailer stops trading, it may not be able to get your money back to you.

If that is the case, you would have to file a claim with Teneo (Ted Baker's administrator) to join a list of creditors owed money by Ted Baker – and even then there's no guarantee you'd get your money back.

You could also file a claim with your debit or credit card provider - but again, no guarantees. 

TL;DR: If you have one - use it as soon as possible. 

Teneo has made no changes to the way gift cards can be used at Ted Baker, but as is the case with all administrators, it can change the terms and conditions at will. 

As above, if you lose out on cash because of a company going into administration, you can raise it with the administrators themselves. 

Credits and debits

As we mentioned earlier, you can file a claim with your debit or credit card provider to recover lost funds - but how exactly does that work?

• Credit card:  If you bought any single item costing between £100-£30,000 and paid on a credit card, the card firm is liable if something goes wrong. If any purchase was less than £100, you may still be able to get your money back via chargeback
• Debit card:  Under chargeback, your bank can try to get your money back from Ted Baker's bank. However, be aware that this is not a legal requirement and it can later be disputed and recalled back to Ted Baker's bank

A US state is considering a bill giving employees the right not to respond to calls, emails and texts from their bosses outside of paid work hours.

The so-called "right to disconnect" would allow California's labour commission to fine employers for interrupting personal time, reports our partner network NBC News.

The bill makes exceptions for emergencies, scheduling and collective bargaining.

The state's Chamber of Commerce called the proposed legislation a step backwards for flexibility.

However, Professor Amira Barger told NBC the changes would help tackle an "epidemic of burnout" and were a "necessary adaptation" for the future of work.

The planned £15bn mega-merger of UK mobile networks Vodafone and Three is to face an in-depth investigation by the competition watchdog.

The Competition and Markets Authority confirmed it will launch a so-called Phase 2 probe after both firms told the regulator they would not be offering measures to ease its concerns ahead of the deadline, 2 April.

The CMA said last month that the tie-up could have a "substantial" impact on competition, warning it may lead to higher prices and reduced quality.

Read more in our full story .

School strikes over teachers' pay and funding could be staged in September, the leader of a teaching union has warned.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), the largest education union in the UK, did not rule out launching a ballot on walkouts for the autumn term.

Teachers at the NEU’s annual conference in Bournemouth will vote today on whether the union should "build capacity" to deliver national industrial action.

Ofgem is considering plans for rules on the use of artificial intelligence in the energy industry amid fears the technology could risk "tacit collusion", reports  The Times.

Algorithms that make pricing decisions for companies would make it more difficult to identify who is accountable when it comes to competition issues, the regulator said.

Customers also need to be protected from higher-risk AI used to help balance supply and demand that could cause power outages if they fail.

By Daniel Binns, business reporter

The FTSE 100 is up more than 0.4% this morning, after a rise in the price of gold boosted precious metal mining firms.

Also up is British fintech Cab Payments. Its shares have shot up 11% in early trading.

It comes after the firm secured a payment provider licence in the Netherlands, paving the way for it to expand in the country.

Meanwhile, the cost of oil continues to slowly creep up in the wake of investor concerns over the Middle East and Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries.

A barrel of Brent crude is currently trading at just over $89 (£70).

The currency markets remain stable, with £1 buying you $1.26 US or €1.17, with the rates almost unchanged from yesterday.

Google is considering charging for premium AI-powered features, the Financial Times reports.

It would be the first time the tech giant put any core products behind a paywall, as it seeks to gain ground in the fast-moving AI space

The FT cited sources familiar with Google's plans as saying it could incorporate a generative AI-powered search engine in its subscription services, which already provide access to its new Gemini AI assistant in Gmail and Docs.

Google's traditional search engine would remain free of charge and ads would continue to appear alongside search results even for subscribers.

"We're not working on or considering an ad-free search experience. As we've done many times before, we'll continue to build new premium capabilities and services to enhance our subscription offerings across Google," the company told Reuters.

Google, which invented the foundational technology for today's AI boom, is locked in battle with two industry players that have captured the business world's attention - ChatGPT's creator OpenAI and its backer Microsoft.

Every Thursday we look at a different savings option, explain the pros and cons, and reveal the best deals on the market (see table below for that).  This week we're talking about the top interest-paying current accounts. Savings Champion founder Anna Bowes  writes...

From time to time there are plenty of incentives available to attempt to encourage people to switch their current accounts - but switching is not always necessary. There are also some current accounts that offer competitive interest rates, even if there's not a switching incentive. 

While not as prevalent as they have been in the recent past, interest-paying current accounts can offer some very competitive interest rates – especially bearing in mind that most current accounts offer no interest at all. In fact, according to the Bank of England, there is £253bn currently held in these non-interest bearing accounts.

These accounts are usually more complicated than a traditional savings account and there are a number of hoops to jump through and potential hazards to avoid, in order to get the returns on offer. 

Potential traps to look out for are: low maximum balances, introductory rates, monthly fees, a requirement to set up direct debits, a minimum amount to pay in each month and a minimum amount to maintain in the account.

All of these factors need to be taken into account when choosing an account and if you feel that you may fall foul of the rules, take a look at one of the alternatives that will suit your circumstances better. 

Setting up standing orders is an easy way to ensure you deposit and withdraw the qualifying amounts each month and can be effective in managing multiple current accounts. It may take a while to set it all up, but the rates on offer could make it worthwhile. It is also worth remembering that many of these accounts can be opened without having to switch your main current account. 

A final point to bear in mind is that some of these accounts give you access to exclusive savings accounts, which often pay competitive rates - especially true with regular savings accounts.

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The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief

President biden says he wants to rake in more money from corporations and high earners. but so far, he has cut more taxes than he’s raised..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[THEME MUSIC]

Today, in his campaign for re-election, President Biden says that raising taxes is at the heart of his agenda. But as it turns out so far, he’s done the opposite as president. My colleague Jim Tankersley explains.

It’s Wednesday, April 3.

Jim, welcome back. We haven’t seen you since the State of the Union. Always a pleasure.

So, so great to be here. And yeah, I finally recovered from staying up all night with you guys.

Yeah, you don’t even know all night. You stopped and we kept going.

That’s true. I did. I got a robust three hours that night. You’re right.

[LAUGHS]:: So Jim, in your capacity as really the chief economic thinker covering this president, you recently came across something very surprising.

Yeah, it started with a pretty basic question for me. I like to do this crazy thing, Michael, where I like to take candidates’ promises and see if they’ve come true.

It’s a little bit wild, but it’s what I do for fun. And in this case, I wanted to look at a very central promise of President Biden’s campaign in 2020, which he has repeated while in office.

I promise you, I guarantee you we can build back, and build back better with an economy that rewards work, not wealth.

The promise was he was going to raise taxes.

But I tell you what I’m going to do, and I make no apologies for it. I’m going to ask the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations of the Fortune 500 companies, 91 making a collective billions of dollars, didn’t pay a single solitary penny in federal tax!

Not taxes on the middle class, not taxes on low income workers, but he was going to raise taxes on corporations and the rich.

But I’m going to make sure they pay their fair share!

He was going to make them pay their fair share. And he leaned into it.

Guess what? You’re going to start paying your fair share. I’m going to ask them to finally begin to pay the fair share. It’s not a punishment. Pay your fair share.

He said it over and over.

Fair share? Translation — it’s back to the failed policies of the 1970s.

Republicans loved this. They repeated it too. They told voters that the president was going to raise taxes.

Joe Biden bragging about raising taxes on corporations. That means less money for those very employers to hire people back.

They talked about all the ways in which corporate tax increases could rebound on workers.

Joe Biden will shut down your economy, raise taxes, wants a $4 trillion tax increase. He’s the only politician I’ve ever seen who said, we will raise your taxes. You’re supposed —

It was a very big part of the economic debate for the campaign.

And I wanted to know, is that true? Has that actually played out in the policy agenda the president has had?

So I asked some economists at the Tax Policy Center in Washington to run an analysis and just say, let’s look at all of the ways Biden has changed the tax code in all of those laws he’s signed, and ask, has he raised taxes as president? And it turns out the answer is he has not raised taxes.

On net, he has cut more taxes than he’s raised.

How much more has he cut taxes than raised them?

So by the math that economists use when they look at budgets, the traditional way of scoring tax changes, he has cut taxes by $600 billion on net.

Hmm. A lot of money, a lot of tax cuts.

It’s a lot of tax cuts. The president has been a net tax cutter.

So Jim, why and how did Biden end up cutting taxes, especially if his stated intent was to raise taxes?

Well, there’s two sides of this equation and two complementary explanations for what’s happened here. The first side is the tax increases that Biden ran on, he’s only done a couple of them. He has trillions of dollars of ideas for how to raise taxes on rich people and corporations. The Treasury Department publishes an entire book full of them every year called “The Green Book.”

But in the actual legislation he signed, there’s only been a couple, really. There was a tax on stock buybacks that companies do and then a new minimum tax for certain multinational corporations that have very low tax rates. Those add up to real money, but they are not, in the grand scheme of Biden’s tax increases, a really large amount of the agenda he’s proposed.

So explanation number one, he just hasn’t been that successful in passing tax increases, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. The biggest one is just the simplest one is that he’s just had a really hard time persuading members of Congress, including Democrats, to back some of his favorite tax increases. He wants to raise the corporate income tax rate, which President Trump cut in his 2017 tax bill. Biden wants to raise it to 28 percent from 21 percent. Congress has not had any appetite to go along with that.

He wanted to get rid of what’s called the carried interest loophole, a long-time white whale of Democratic policy making. But he could not get even 50 Democrats to go along with that. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was opposed to it, and so it didn’t get included.

And he did some pieces of legislation on a bipartisan basis. And in those cases, Republicans were just not going to pay for anything by raising taxes, and so he had to take those off the table there. So it’s all added up to just not very much activity in Congress to raise taxes on what Biden wants to do.

Got it. So that’s the side of a ledger where Biden simply fails to increase taxes because he can’t get Congress to increase taxes.

Right. But there’s another side, which is also that Biden has signed into law a decent number of tax cuts.

And that starts from the very beginning. Just a couple of months into his presidency, if you’ll recall, we’re still in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy is wobbling after it had started to rebound. Biden proposes what is essentially a stimulus bill.

And he includes some tax cuts in there, a tax cut for families, a child tax credit. And it also includes — you remember those direct checks that people got as part of that bill?

Yes, $1,400. I remember them.

Yes, those were technically tax cuts.

So the stimulus bill starts with that. The next year, he passes this bill that is trying to accelerate manufacturing of things like semiconductors in the United States. That’s the CHIPS Act. And that includes some corporate tax cuts for companies that invest in the kind of manufacturing that Biden wants. This is industrial policy via carrots for corporations. And Biden is handing them out as part of this bill.

So tax cuts there. And then finally the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes the largest climate effort in American history is a bunch of corporate tax cuts at its core, tax cuts for manufacturing of solar panels, tax cuts for people to buy electric vehicles, tax cuts for all sorts of things tied to the transition from fossil fuels to lower emission sources of energy. And those tax cuts add up. They add up for corporations. They add up for individuals. And in the end, that full suite of tax cuts that he’s passed across all of this legislation outweighs the modest tax increases that were also included in the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce its cost.

Got it. So a very big reason why Biden ends up cutting taxes, beyond the fact that he’s not able to raise them through Congress, is that that’s what it took, according to those in his administration, to get American industry and American consumers to change their behavior in line with policy goals such as getting more domestic computer chip manufacturing and getting more people to buy electric vehicles they decided the way to do that was to give people tax breaks, which means he cut their taxes.

Right, people and companies. The president certainly has talked throughout the campaign about wanting to give middle class families a break. But he has also, in the process of crafting policy, really come to rely on tax cuts for people and for corporations as a way of achieving these policy goals. And in many cases, again, this is what he had to do to pass these bills through even Democrats in Congress.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia didn’t want to just send money to companies that were making solar panels. He wanted there to be tax incentives for it. And so that is part of the reason why these were created as tax incentives. And so all of this adds up to more of a tax cutting record than you might have imagined when Biden was on the campaign trail.

I’m curious who really ended up benefiting from these tax cuts. You said they went to people and to corporations, but on the whole, did they end up reaching lower income Americans, middle income Americans, or the rich?

Well, we don’t have a full distributional analysis, which is what you’re asking for, of the entirety of Biden’s tax changes. But what we can say this — particularly the ones that were in that early stimulus bill, the recovery plan, those were very much targeted toward lower income and middle income Americans.

There were income limits on who could get things like the Child Tax Credit. Obviously, the direct payments went to people who were middle class or less. So the analysis of that would suggest that these were tax cuts for lower income people, for middle class people. And on the flip side, what I think we are likely to see with the electric vehicle credit through the Inflation Reduction Act is that while there are some income limits on who can qualify for that credit, that the people who end up claiming that credit tend to be the higher earners among the people who qualify.

Right. Who buys a Tesla, after all? Somebody with a fair amount of money.

Right, exactly. And of course, the corporate tax cuts go to companies, flow through to their shareholders. There’s a huge debate in the academic literature among politicians about how much of that benefit actually ends up going to their workers versus stays with shareholders. But we can broadly say that Joe Biden has done a lot for certain corporations who are trying to advance his manufacturing goals in particular to reduce their tax bills. And that is certainly not in line with the rhetoric you hear him talking about most of the time about making corporations pay their fair share. And the White House acknowledges this. I asked them about it. And they basically said, we think there’s a difference between just cutting the corporate tax rate in a way that helps anybody no matter what they’re doing and what we’re trying to do, which is basically reward corporations for accelerating the energy transition.

Understood. But where does this ultimately leave Biden’s campaign promise to make the tax code fairer and to make sure that the well-off in particular and corporations are paying their, what he calls, fair share?

Well, I think by Biden’s own measurements, by his own ambitions, he would have to agree that he is nowhere close to what he believes would be a fair share for corporations. Because Biden is still running on this. As he enters his re-election campaign, as it really heats up, a rematch with Donald Trump, the president is really leaning into this message of we need to do more. We need to raise more taxes on corporate America. It is time for these companies and for high earners to pay their fair share.

Right. I didn’t get it done in the first term. But if you elect me, I’ll get it done in the second.

Give me another shot, and this time, I promise, will be different.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

So Jim, let’s talk about Biden’s tax raising plans for a theoretical second term and why anyone should have any faith that he could get it done, if there’s a second term, given the experience so far of his first term.

Yeah, well, man, there’s a lot of plans to talk about. I don’t think we can get through all of them, but we can certainly hit the highlights here. So we can start with the couple of things that Biden has been able to do to raise taxes on corporations. He wants to take those and then plus them up.

He’s put this new minimum tax on corporations. It’s a 15 percent minimum tax on certain multinationals. He now wants to raise that to 21 percent.

He wants to take that corporate stock buyback tax which is 1 percent right now, and he’d like to quadruple it to 4 percent. And then he goes after some things large and small. He wants to do new taxes that hit the use of corporate and private jets. He wants to do new taxes on companies that pay large amounts of compensation to their executives.

And then we get to some really big taxes on high earning individuals. So the president has said over and over again, he won’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. But he’s got a bunch of taxes for the people above that. So he wants to raise the top marginal income tax rate. He wants to take it from 37 percent, which is the level set by President Trump’s 2017 tax law, and bring it back to 39.6 percent, which is what it was before. He also wants to impose what he calls a billionaires tax.

OK. It’s a 25 percent tax on the total value of all of the assets of anyone worth more than $100 million.

OK, wait. I have several questions about this.

First being a fact check, if it’s a billionaires tax, it’s interesting that it’s going after people who have just 100 million.

Yeah, I think most billionaires would be offended at the inclusion of 100 millionaires in that. Yes, totally agree. That is factually inaccurate, the name.

Right. But beyond that, this sounds very much like a wealth tax, which we don’t really have in our system.

Yeah, it’s a sort of wealth tax. The Biden people don’t call it a wealth tax, but it is a tax on something other than income that you report every year to the IRS as having been earned. It goes beyond just, oh, I got interest from my stock holdings or I made money from my job. It’s, oh, the value of my art collection increased last year, and now Biden’s going to tax me on that increase, even if I didn’t sell the art.

That’s a real change, and that reflects the president’s view that people with enough money to buy enormous art collections that appreciate enormously in value should be paying more in taxes.

Right. And of course, a tax like this is extremely perhaps maddeningly hard to actually pull off. It’s hard to get someone to describe their art collection’s value so that you can apply a 25 tax to it. So this might end up being more of a political statement than a practical tax.

Yeah, there’s also questions about whether it’s constitutional. So there’s all sorts of drama around this proposal, but it is certainly, if nothing else, a statement of the president’s intent to make people worth a lot of money pay a lot more in taxes.

OK, so that’s a lot of proposed tax increases, almost all of them focused on those who are rich and corporations. Overall, Jim, what stands out to you about this Biden term two tax increase plan?

I think we could very fairly say that it’s the largest tax increasing plan by a sitting president or a presidential nominee for a party in American history.

He wants to get a lot of money from corporations and people who earn or are worth a lot of money.

But the rub, of course, is it’s hard to see the Congressional math that lets Biden accomplish these tax increases, some of which, like you said, he couldn’t get done the first time. Why would we think he would get them done the second time even if he wins this fall?

Yeah, it would be really difficult. Biden would have to win in November. Democrats would have to take the House of Representatives back from Republicans, which is certainly possible. It’s very closely divided right now. And they’d need to hold at least 50 seats in the Senate. And then those 50 Democrats in the Senate would have to be willing to go along with far more in tax increases than Democrats were last time around.

So if there is a second term, it feels like we should assume it will be very difficult perhaps even quite unlikely he’s going to get to push through a lot of these taxes. Which makes me wonder, Jim, why is Biden running on a tax program that he knows has so little chance of becoming reality and when it’s pretty clear that he’s gotten a lot of stuff done without raising taxes? It turns out that’s not been all that essential to getting infrastructure or climate bills done. So why is he making this so central?

Several reasons. One of them is it’s very important to him rhetorically to talk about fiscal responsibility. Big parts of the Biden agenda, the CHIPS bill, the infrastructure bill, some other legislation, were not actually paid for. The spending and tax cuts were not offset by tax increases.

So they’re going to add to the debt.

Right. So they’re going to add to the debt. Same is true of the stimulus bill. But moving forward, the president has said that he’s going to pay for his agenda and he’s actually going to have some extra tax dollars coming in left over to help pay down future budget deficits. And on paper, it’s the way to pay for Biden’s other big, expansive plans that he hasn’t been able to do but wants to — universal child care, federal paid leave, investing in elder care, just a whole bunch of things that he still wants to do more — housing initiatives.

The president needs money to make a case that he’s being fiscally responsible, and this is the money that would do that.

So that’s one reason. Another reason is the calendar. Biden and his team are looking ahead to the end of 2025, and they know that if he wins another term, he will be in office at a rare moment in Washington, when basically tax policy has to be on the Congressional agenda.

Well, Republicans, when they passed their tax cuts in 2017, set a bunch of them to expire at the end of 2025 in order to lower the cost of the bill.

These are the Trump tax cuts.

The Trump tax cuts. And that includes all the tax cuts for individuals. So now that those are coming due, there’s going to be a fight in Washington over whether to extend them or make them permanent or change them in some way or just let them expire, and Democrats know there’s going to be a huge fight that will reach almost certainly the floor of the House and the Senate. And so Biden wants to be ready.

He wants to be ready with a suite of policy proposals that Democrats can basically pull off the shelf and try to use to put Republicans in a box. Basically say, we would like to keep taxes low or cut them further for low income workers, middle class workers. But we want to pay for that by raising taxes on the rich. You Republicans also want to do nice things for low and middle class workers, but you want to cut taxes for corporations and the rich, and we think that’s a political loser for you.

So Biden is ready with what they think will be a political winner for Democrats in this almost certain floor tax fight at the end of 2025.

And that brings us to the last reason why Biden is doing this, and maybe the most important, which is it’s really good politics.

Just explain that. Why is talking about tax increases, net tax increases, such good politics?

If you talk to Democratic pollsters, if you talk to people inside the White House, outside the White House, political strategists anywhere in Biden’s orbit, they all agree that the public loves the idea of forcing rich people and corporations to pay their, quote, “fair share.” It’s just become a winning and central political argument in Democratic campaigns, the idea that corporations avoid taxes, that rich people avoid taxes, and that Joe Biden is trying to position himself as a champion of the idea that they need to pay more. Those corporations and those rich people need to pay more, and he’s going to make it happen.

You’re describing this as something that is kind of a new political reality. Is that right?

Yeah, it’s evolved over the last decade or so I think. For a long time in Washington, the conventional wisdom was just couldn’t talk about tax increases of any kind. They were poison. There was a whole anti-tax movement that did a really good job of messaging that, and Democratic candidates got very scared of talking about raising taxes even on the very, very rich.

That started to turn over time. But it’s really changed. I think we saw in the 2020 election that the Democratic primary had just enormous amounts of taxes on corporations and the rich funding all sorts of policy proposals — Medicare for all and universal child care and trillions and trillions of dollars — and Democratic candidates like Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders competing to see who could tax corporations and the rich the most.

Biden is a product of that primary. He was one of the most moderate people in that group, but his proposals are really outside of the historical norm for Democratic candidates up until then. And that reflects the fact that pollsters have been doing all this research, finding that the American people, including independents and increasingly numbers of Republicans, just don’t think corporations pay their fair share and are open to the idea they should pay more.

This is really interesting, and it makes me think that what you’re really saying is that there might have been a time when a Democratic nominee like Joe Biden might have reveled in his image as an overall tax cutter. But that is not this moment, and that is not this candidate. He wants to be a tax increaser. He thinks that is where the politics are.

I think that’s exactly right when you think about tax increaser as tax increaser on the rich and on corporations. There’s two ways to be a successful populist politician. One of them is to be like Trump and run around saying you’re going to do enormous tax cuts for everybody, which is a Republican version of populism. Trump, my biggest tax cut in history, I’m going to do another huge, enormous tax cut. It’s going to be so big you won’t believe it.

There might have been a time when Democrats tried to follow that playbook. But Biden’s not doing that. He’s leaning into the other side of populism. He’s telling workers, hey, I’m on your side with these big companies. They’re trying to screw you, and I’m not going to stand for it. And so I’m going to raise their taxes. I’m going to make them pay more so that there’s more money for you, whether that’s more tax cuts or more programs or whatever.

And that is the Democratic version of populism right now, and that’s the one that Joe Biden is running on. And that’s why he’s so happy to talk about raising corporate taxes because it’s a way to tell workers, hey, I’m on your side.

Right. Even if that’s not what he’s done or ever may be able to do.

Yeah. Part of the problem with populism is that you make a lot of promises you can’t keep, and this certainly, in his first term, has been an area where the president has talked a much bigger game than he’s been able to execute. The second term might be different, but that doesn’t really matter for the campaign. What matters is the rhetoric.

Well, Jim, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Israel confirmed that it had carried out the airstrike that killed seven aid workers delivering food to civilians in Gaza. The attack, which occurred on Monday, struck a convoy run by the World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit group. At the time of the attack, the aid workers were traveling in clearly marked cars that designated them as non-combatants.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the attack as unintentional and said that his government deeply regretted the deaths. In its own statement, World Central Kitchen called the strike unforgivable and said that as a result, it would suspend its aid work in Gaza, where millions of people are in dire need of both food and medicine.

Today’s episode was produced by Stella Tan and Mary Wilson with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Lisa Chow, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

• April 4, 2024   •   32:37 Israel’s Deadly Airstrike on the World Central Kitchen
• April 3, 2024   •   27:42 The Accidental Tax Cutter in Chief
• April 2, 2024   •   29:32 Kids Are Missing School at an Alarming Rate
• April 1, 2024   •   36:14 Ronna McDaniel, TV News and the Trump Problem
• March 29, 2024   •   48:42 Hamas Took Her, and Still Has Her Husband
• March 28, 2024   •   33:40 The Newest Tech Start-Up Billionaire? Donald Trump.
• March 27, 2024   •   28:06 Democrats’ Plan to Save the Republican House Speaker
• March 26, 2024   •   29:13 The United States vs. the iPhone
• March 25, 2024   •   25:59 A Terrorist Attack in Russia
• March 24, 2024   •   21:39 The Sunday Read: ‘My Goldendoodle Spent a Week at Some Luxury Dog ‘Hotels.’ I Tagged Along.’
• March 22, 2024   •   35:30 Chuck Schumer on His Campaign to Oust Israel’s Leader
• March 21, 2024   •   27:18 The Caitlin Clark Phenomenon

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Jim Tankersley

Produced by Stella Tan and Mary Wilson

With Michael Simon Johnson

Edited by Lisa Chow

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Chris Wood

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In his campaign for re-election, President Biden has said that raising taxes on the wealthy and on big corporations is at the heart of his agenda. But under his watch, overall net taxes have decreased.

Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy for The Times, explains.

On today’s episode

Jim Tankersley , who covers economic policy at the White House for The New York Times.

Background reading

An analysis prepared for The New York Times estimates that the tax changes President Biden has ushered into law will amount to a net cut of about $600 billion over four years.

“Does anybody here think the tax code’s fair?” For Mr. Biden, tax policy has been at the center of his efforts to make the economy more equitable.

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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

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Jim Tankersley writes about economic policy at the White House and how it affects the country and the world. He has covered the topic for more than a dozen years in Washington, with a focus on the middle class. More about Jim Tankersley

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