Most of President Biden’s big proposals are now on the table, and stock market investors have concluded everything will be okay.
They won’t necessarily say that. Big battles are underway over raising the corporate tax rate, the capital gains tax rate for millionaires and the top income tax bracket. CEOs and some economists insist higher taxes on business activity and investing will depress both, with some workers ultimately losing out because of slower job growth or weaker income gains. They may even turn out to be right. But the evidence now suggests none of this will harm stocks.
The clearest sign of this is the market itself. The day after Biden unveiled his American Family Plan—and the tax hikes he wants to pay for nearly $2 trillion in social-welfare spending—the S&P 500 and NASDAQ stock indexes hit record highs. They weren’t necessarily cheering for Biden’s plans, and were mostly driven upward by earnings news. But that’s good: Markets functioning normally, without political interference messing things up.
Three factors are reassuring investors. First, Congress is unlikely to pass the exact tax hikes Biden is asking for. Biden wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, but Congress will probably only go as far as 25%. The corporate rate used to be 35%, and stocks still went up most of the time, so a 25% rate seems relatively benign.
Biden is calling for a raising the capital gains rate from 23.8% to 43.4% for investors earning more than $1 million. He won’t get that either, with a more likely outcome being a top rate of 28% to 30%. Congress probably will raise the top income tax rate from 37% to 39.6%, as Biden wants, but this would only affect about 1% of taxpayers.
Even the smaller tax hikes would cut into corporate profits and reduce the return on investing, so wouldn’t that hurt stock values? Maybe a little, but all the spending Biden wants to do would probably have a stimulative effect, more than offsetting the contracting effect of tax hikes. Infrastructure build-outs in particular tend to have a positive return in the long term, since they make the economy more efficient and productive. Businesses benefit the most.
Moody’s Analytics analyzed the Biden infrastructure plan and forecast it would boost GDP growth by 1.5 percentage points by 2024. There would be 2.4 million additional jobs. By the end of the decade, productivity growth—the key to boosting living standards—would be stronger. Other studies find a smaller or even negative economic impact from Biden’s plans, but changes would be so distant the market doesn’t seem to care. And that would be if all the Biden tax hikes went into account, not a Biden-lite package watered down by Congress.