The Patriot Post® · Joe Biden's Not-So-Great Society

If there’s one thing the Biden-Harris administration has managed to accomplish, it’s full-time employment for those who print our currency.

Of course, that’s a tongue-in-cheek statement. U.S. spending has long been in the form of IOUs to various bondholders around the globe. But one can’t argue the fact that Joe Biden, who likes to lie about “Jim Crow on steroids,” is creating his own special variety of Keynesian economics on steroids by ratcheting up new deficits by the trillions.

In his address to a joint session of part of Congress Wednesday night, Biden announced another jaw-dropping $1.8 trillion for the “American Families Plan.” That’s on top of $1.9 trillion for not-COVID relief and $2.3 trillion more for a hazily defined “infrastructure” plan where most of the money comes nowhere close to a construction project, shovel-ready or otherwise.

Biden’s government by executive order has coincided with decreasing unemployment brought by a reopening economy, and his popularity exceeds President Donald Trump’s primarily because the Leftmedia tells a story of “calm after the storm.” But few enterprising members of the media have bothered to question how this spending spree will be paid for.

The Biden-Harris cabal claims that a lot of revenue will be raised by soaking the billionaires who have ostensibly prospered over the last year by restoring the pre-Trump 39.6% tax rate for high-income earners and treating their capital gains as ordinary income, which would essentially double their current 20% tax rate on investments they sell. But not only will that fail to raise enough funding for the progressives’ ambitious schemes, it will place the economy in another free fall as private investment dries up. Meanwhile, other government meddling will create a surge in energy costs and discourage productive enterprise so as not to offend the “woke.”

However, if your philosophy is to never waste a crisis because the uncertainty allows you to consolidate more power and control, we are on the verge of a golden era. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board presciently opines, “The cost [of Biden’s economic policy], while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.”

Bingo.

We’ve already destroyed three generations of urban (mostly minority) poor by creating a caste of government-dependent serfs who are given barely enough to survive thanks to direct cash payments and subsidies but not enough to prosper. Yet they fearfully clutch the one straw that they have, and that’s government dependency. Indeed, starvation is a good motivator, and sometimes the opportunity for a free meal is what draws this group to the polls — assuming they vote the way those supplying the freebies want them to vote. Judging by the election data, it’s a successful program for those who thirst for power.

Sadly, this entitlement mentality is nothing new, nor is it confined to urban poor — even at Tea Party events you could find well-matured people who opposed tax increases but cried, “Don’t you touch my Medicare and Social Security!” Of course, there’s a big difference between earned entitlements that you pay into and unearned entitlements that you merely receive, but the end result is similar. Having ensnared many among our seasoned citizens and urban poor into dependence on Uncle Sam, the Biden-led government is working hard to expand the neediness into the working class — at least the ones still willing to work. (Perhaps we would be closer to full employment if being out of work wasn’t so lucrative thanks to several of the China Virus relief programs.)

At this point, absent a significant course correction in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, the question may be only one of when the house of cards finally collapses.