The United States seems to be in a recession. Unemployment is up.

Joe Biden will end new oil and gas leases on federal land and end offshore drilling. He will also increase the capital gains tax rate.

Biden proposes an outright repeal of Trump’s tax reform package, raising taxes on the middle class, blue-collar families and American corporations, large and small. Such tax increases would return America’s corporate tax rate to close to 40 percent, the highest in the world.

American companies have brought $1 trillion back to the United States since the passage of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, according to new U.S. Department of Commerce data.

Biden proposes to reinstate the ObamaCare individual mandate tax, which hits lower-income and middle-class households the hardest. Trump’s 2017 tax reform zeroed out that Obama Care tax, to help working people. Biden also would increase the “death tax,” impose a new minimum tax on smaller businesses, and double the tax on overseas income. His new energy taxes would increase prices at the pump and utility bills.

President Trump’s 2017 tax reform cut taxes for corporations, small businesses, blue-collar workers and the middle class. Since the 2016 election, employers have added 7 million new jobs and, until the COVID-19 pandemic this spring, Trump’s tax reform package created an economy that produced the lowest unemployment in American history for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians, along with increases in wages and middle-class incomes.

The poverty rate fell to a 17-year low of 11.8% under the Trump administration as a result of a jobs-rich environment.

Poverty rates for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans have reached their lowest levels since the U.S. began collecting such data.

Janet K. Bohmer, Lima