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Five Ways Manchin Biden BBB Helps the Wealthy and Harms Working Families

August 10, 2022 — 'Inflation Reduction Act'    — Bidenflation    — Blog    — Democrats' Drug Price Control Scheme    — Health    — Oversight    — Press Releases    — Select Revenue Measures    — Tax Cuts & Jobs Act   

Working families and small businesses are struggling under 40-year high inflation and a recession, yet the Manchin-Biden Build Back Better bill provides greater benefits to the wealthy. Here are the top five ways it puts the wealthy and well-connected over working families.

READ: One-Pager: Senate Version of Manchin-Biden Build Back Better

  1. Audits for the Wal-Mart shoppers.
  • Lower- and middle-income earning Americans are the primary target in Democrats’ bill, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, who says that from 78 percent to 90 percent of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4 percent to 9 percent would come from those making more than $500,000.”

READ: Brady on Manchin-Biden Bill: Attention Walmart Shoppers–More IRS Audits Headed Your Way

  1. Special carve outs prioritize the wealthy and well-connected over working families:
  • The book minimum tax, the centerpiece of the Manchin-Biden bill, hikes taxes on American businesses at the worst possible moment during a recession.
    • It includes certain loopholes for the wealthy. These special carveouts include Green New Deal tax credits, Union pensions, and semiconductor tax credits. 
  1. Working taxpayers pay for Obamacare subsidies that go to the well-off.
  • Democrats have made clear they want to make this bill’s three year extension of Obamacare subsidies permanent, forcing working families to pay $248 billion to bribe people into Obamacare, including people making over 400 percent of the federal poverty level, a group that was never intended to get subsidies under the original health care law. 
  • These subsidies hide the true cost of health insurance and disincentivize insurance companies from reducing costs, which is why health insurance inflation is already 17 percent over the last year. 
  • They also contribute to the worker shortage that drives inflation, according to CBO, “mainly because of the enhanced health insurance subsidies, pushing down output and pushing up inflation.”
  1. Families facing life-threatening illnesses will have fewer cures, while prices rise to levels only the wealthy can afford
  • Democrats’ price-fixing scheme would kill up to 342 cures, according to a study by the University of Chicago and a Vital Transformation study finds that if drug price controls under consideration in the Senate had been enacted during the last decade, only six of 110 currently approved therapies would have made it to patients.

READ: Manchin-Biden Build Back Better Drug Price Controls Would Lead to Massive Loss of Life, Negate Cancer Moonshot by Nine Times

  1. Democrats protect a special deduction for the wealthy while raising taxes on Main Street “pass-through” businesses.
  • Democrats call for higher taxes on 4.7 million Main Street businesses who employ nearly half of America’s workforce in order to protect the SALT tax break for wealthy people in high-tax states. This shifts the burden of taxation onto the millions of Americans who live in lower tax states.

READ: Small Business Tax Hikes Amidst Recession in Manchin-Biden Build Back Better Mean Higher and Longer Inflation