Biden to talk about the economy in Scranton in first stop of three-day push through Pennsylvania

SCRANTON— When President Joe Biden kicks off a three-day swing through Pennsylvania today in his hometown of Scranton, he will seek to detail the differences between his tax policies and those of former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, his campaign said Monday.

The president’s Scranton speech the day after tax day “will drive home a simple question: Do you think the tax code should work for rich people and for corporations or for the middle class? Joe Biden knows his answer. So does Donald Trump,” Biden-Harris 2024 communications director Michael Tyler said on a Monday call with reporters.

Scranton is the first of three stops Biden will make in Pennsylvania this week, and comes exactly a week before the state’s primary. He’ll make his first visit to the western end of the state on Wednesday, with a visit to Pittsburgh to speak at the United Steelworkers headquarters, and a trip to Philadelphia on Thursday.

While Biden is campaigning in Pennsylvania, Trump is in a New York City courtroom facing criminal charges of falsifying business records to cover up payments made in 2016 after an alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump is the first former U.S. president to stand trial in criminal proceedings.

Biden has brought his economic agenda to Scranton on the campaign trail in previous election cycles. In 2019, he visited this exact location during his first presidential campaign, emphasizing his roots in the region and the economy built by the Obama-Biden administration. During that stop, he criticized the tax reform bill passed by then-President Trump.

Tuesday’s visit to the Electric City looks to echo that theme.

“The President wants to speak very plainly about Donald Trump’s tax plan because of the stakes and the consequences it could have for families all across the country, families like the ones that he’ll be speaking to tomorrow in Scranton,” former director of the White House National Economic Council Brian Deese said on the Monday campaign call.

Trump said at a fundraiser last week that if elected to another term, he would seek to extend provisions of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are due to expire at the end of 2025. That would confirm reporting by Bloomberg in January that Trump planned to make the individual tax cuts permanent; the same article reported that Trump would keep the 21% corporate tax rate of the TCJA.

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The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that extending the TCJA cuts would reduce average taxes for those with incomes above $4.5 million by $175,000 each.

Trump’s website contains few details about a tax plan should he win another term, and the campaign did not respond to an email from the Capital-Star seeking further information. According to the campaign website, Trump would impose a universal baseline tariff on all U.S. imports, and impose a 60% tariff on all U.S. imports from China. He would also seek to tax large university endowments.

Biden’s 2025 budget calls for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, splitting the difference between the 21% rate set in the 2017 tax law a Republican Congress passed during President Donald Trump’s term and the 35% rate that existed before that law.

The budget would also raise the corporate minimum tax included in the Inflation Reduction Act, from 15% to 21%, and would seek to override loopholes and other tax provisions that allow the wealthiest taxpayers to pay a lower effective tax rate than many working-class taxpayers. It would do so by establishing a 25% minimum tax rate on people with wealth of more than $100 million.

“Nobody making less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes go up in a Biden second term,” Deese said.

And asked what “loopholes” Biden would seek to close as part of overall tax policy, Deese said the carried interest loophole — which lets investment managers pay a lower tax rate on certain income — is one that Biden “has for some time identified as unfair and inefficient and resources that would be better used more productively elsewhere.”

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Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, made his fourth appearance in the Keystone State in 2024 on Saturday at a rally in the Lehigh Valley. 

Following his address at the Scranton Cultural Center, Biden has another campaign event scheduled for 5:40 pm. Although there were no official details from the campaign, WNEP reported “no parking” signs were posted outside of Biden’s childhood home and outside of the Carpenter’s Union building in Scranton. The president is scheduled to stay the night in Scranton.

Northeast Pennsylvania is a must-win region of the commonwealth for both campaigns. 

During Trump’s successful 2016 campaign, he made massive gains in Lackawanna County, home to Scranton, and neighboring Luzerne County.  Hillary Clinton won Lackawanna County by 3.5 points over Trump, while Obama won the county over Republican Mitt Romney by 27 points in 2012. Trump flipped Luzerne County red in 2016 by winning it by just under 20 points, while Obama carried Luzerne County by about 5 points in 2012.

In 2020, Lackawanna stayed blue and Luzerne County stayed red, although Biden made improvements in both. Biden won Lackawanna County by nearly 8.5 points over Trump, while Trump won Luzerne County by about 14.5 points. 

Pennsylvania polling shows Biden and Trump neck and neck. The Cook Political Report, a national ratings outlet, tags Pennsylvania as one of the six “toss-up” states this cycle and its 19 electoral votes are the most of any other state in that category.