By John Ubaldi, “Ubaldi Reports”

Now that former Vice President Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic Party’s presidential nominee will we have the opportunity to truly know how he will govern the United States economically?

Throughout the Democratic primary Biden has given opaque and less than full transparency on what his economic policies will be considering his decade’s long service as a senator and his eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama.

As the nation draws closer to the November 2020 presidential election the economy once again will be the pivotal issue as both Biden and President Trump will have to navigate through the economic turmoil from the shutdown of the country by the coronavirus.

Throughout the Democratic primaries Biden had to fend off attacks from socialist candidate Vermont Senator Bernie Sander’s and the fact that progressives account for around 72% of all Democratic voters as reported by the Rasmussen Reports.

One of the biggest arguments made during the Democratic primaries was the wealthy weren’t paying their fair share of taxes.  They kept hammering this point home that the middle class face an undue burden perpetrated by the Trump administrations economic policies has only exacerbated income inequality.

At a speech at the liberal leaning Brookings Institute, Biden stated, “This country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers and CEOs and hedge fund managers. It was built by the American middle class,” he said at a rally kicking off his campaign. Although this sounds like something Bernie Sanders would say, Biden has cast himself as a moderate with sensible, achievable plans rather than the leader of “a revolution” against economic inequality. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” said Biden.

As it relates to taxes, according to the most recent report by the IRS covering Tax Year 2017 (filed in 2018), the National Taxpayers Union Foundation reported that the top 10 percent of earners bore responsibility for 70 percent of all income taxes paid – up slightly from 2016 – while half of all tax filers paid 97 percent of all income tax revenue. Indicating the degree of the progressiveness in the code, the bottom 50 percent of earners took home 11 percent of total nationwide income while owing 3 percent of all income taxes.

Prior to the coronavirus which has crippled the U.S. economy, the Census Bureau Current Population Survey data showed that adjusted for inflation incomes under Trump have increased over $5,000 per individual with incomes reaching almost $66,000.

The increase has far outstripped the last 16 years when it was $401 under President Bush; this was exacerbated by a deep recession in 2008.  Under the Obama administration incomes edged up just over $1,000, which also coincide with near zero interest rates, and $4 trillion of quantitative easing injected into the economy by the Federal Reserve.

A report by the “Liberal leaning” Urban Institute analyzed Biden’s economic plan showing that he would increase income and payroll taxes on high-income individuals and increase income taxes on corporations.  Biden would also increase federal tax revenues by $4.0 trillion over the next decade. Under his plan, the highest-income households would see substantially larger tax increases than households in other income groups, both in dollar amounts and as a share of their incomes.

How would corporate America and the wealthy react to this increase in taxes?  Would they move their investment wealth overseas into less restrictive tax countries? Would business owners then hold back on domestic capital investments?  Empirical evidence as shown this would replicate the stagnant economy of the Obama administration.

Questions also remain whether Biden’s tax plan favor’s the elimination of state and local taxes (SALT) which was passed in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.  This deduction allows individuals in high tax states such as California and New York to deduct local tax payments on their federal income tax.  Both New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are pushing for its repeal, which would essentially give wealthy Americans especially those residing in high tax states a federal tax cut.

The analysis by the Urban Institute didn’t factor into Biden’s new spending proposals on whether all of his tax increases would be able to cover all the new expansive federal programs he envisions such healthcare, education and his “Green New Deal,” which is not as pricey as Sander’s plan but still very expensive.

Biden’s Healthcare alone would cost $750 billion over 10 years by expanding Obamacare that introduces a public option similar to Medicare offering premium free insurance to individuals.  The question that has never been asked, will this public option be taxpayer funded with rules and regulations written by politicians to compete with the private insurance market.

The private market wouldn’t be able to compete with the taxpayer funded public option, with its unlimited revenue, and regulation favoring the government plan.  If the past is any guide we have seen from empirical evidence that government programs that do not live up to expectations, as always will need an infusion of taxpayer funds from the federal government.   The Affordable Care Act comes to mind!

Now that Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, he has been forced by the insurgency of the Sander’s campaign to need the support of his progressive followers.  This need for Sander’s progressive followers has forced Biden to change past policies, and embrace far-left leaning policies such as his support for forgiving all student loan debt for individuals making under $125,000.  How do we pay for this?

Now on Biden’s campaign website he states, he will also make four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free for all students whose family incomes are below $125,000.  How do we pay for this?

What has not been asked of Biden was his past support for the passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.  This act passed through Congress while he served as vice president by reconciliation with a simple majority vote instead of the traditional 60 vote threshold commonly done on most Senate legislation.  This act amended the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with a rider that included the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act.

This in effect now has the federal government directly administrating federal student loans, which in effect was the impetus for college and universities to substantially raise tuition’s and administrative costs knowing the federal government would back all student loans.

This was on full display when in April 2019, when Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) who is the Chairperson of the House Financial Services Committee, and didn’t know that the major banks have been out of the student loan business for a decade, incidentally she voted for the change a decade ago.   Biden needs to be asked this as well!

Biden also has never been pressed for his past support for a previous bill he supported which passed under the Bush Administration making it harder for someone to discharge student loan debt during bankruptcy.

One of the most controversial decisions by the Democrats during the primary was the acceptance of the “Green New Deal.” All candidates expressed spending between $53-93 trillion on a total transformation of the U.S. economy reaching the ultimate goal of 100% clean energy no later than 2030. How do we pay for this?

Biden would also recommit to rejoining the Paris Climate Accord adopted by the United States in 2015, but never ratified by the Senate, and eventually withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2017.  The question never asked is how a Biden administration would force China to live up to the precepts of the agreement when they haven’t lived up to any part of the agreement.  Currently, Beijing is the world leader in greenhouse gas admissions?

This question never gets asked, and only becomes more complicated for Biden in relationship to his past China polices, especially after Beijing repeated lies regarding the coronavirus pandemic.  So far the media fails to ask Biden these basic questions!

Just last year Biden unveiled his own version “New Green Deal” initiative that would cost more than $5 trillion over ten years in obtaining a 100% clean energy economy by 2050, but again never forcibly asked in any detail about the millions of individuals who work in the energy sector; what happens to their jobs?

In 2017 U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER) finds that employment in the energy sector approximately account for 6.4 million Americans, with the average base pay for a driller in the fracking industry around $128,000 as reported by glassdoor.com.

In the same year the American Petroleum Institute (API) released a new study showing that the natural gas and oil industry supported 10.3 million U.S. jobs and added $1.3 trillion to the nation’s economy in 2015. The study found that jobs supported by the industry increased by 500,000 since 2011 and showed that all 50 states, whether producing or non-producing, continued to benefit from the industry.

Biden stated as it relates to coal jobs in a speech in New Hampshire, “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well…Give me a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for god’s sake!”

The average pay for a coalminer is $77,000 compared to a computer programmer at $62,000, and most of all energy sector jobs are located in rural areas, how many programmer jobs are there in rural America?

Biden often speaks of transitioning energy sector jobs to a green economy but what type of jobs are these?  There hasn’t been any articulated detail.  During the sixth Democratic debate he was asked if he would be willing to sacrifice jobs in the oil and gas industries to transition to a green economy.

“The answer’s yes,” Biden said when asked about the issue by Politico’s Tim Alberta. “We should, in fact, be making sure right now that every new building built is energy contained, that it doesn’t leak energy, that in fact, we should be providing tax credits for people to be able to make their homes turn to solar power. They’re all kinds of folks — right here in California, we’re now on the verge of having batteries that are about the size of the top of this podium that you can store energy when in fact the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. We have enormous opportunities.”

What wasn’t asked of Biden is by eliminating energy sector jobs wouldn’t this be giving a victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin?  Just last month Putin instigated an energy war by refusing to go along with a production cut with Saudi Arabia to stabilize the oil market, but the real aim is to bankrupt U.S. energy companies especially fracking companies.

For the first time in seventy years the U.S. is net exporter of energy and not beholden to OPEC or adversarial nations for our energy needs, this would change dramatically and would only be giving a victory to Russia.  It’s interesting Democrats have been accusing Trump of being soft on Russia, this would be a huge benefit to Moscow and other adversarial nations for example such as Iran and Venezuela.

For a candidate of a major party it’s strange that for someone running for the presidency for the first time in history a presidential candidate is articulating eliminating jobs instead of promising to create jobs.

With the presidential campaign down to two candidates it is time to ask detailed and more substantive questions regarding the nation’s economy of former Vice President Joe Biden instead of just giving him softball questions or not even asking detailed ones at all.

The country deserves better answers!