The Patriot Post® · The Six Trillion Dollar Man

The supposedly “moderate” Joe Biden is systematically enacting the leftist agenda of the most radical members of his party. CNN incoherently calls it “moderate radicalism.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says he has “definitely exceeded the expectations” of the far Left. Indeed, if she were president, would the bill for federal spending actually be much higher, or would the agenda be any further left? It’s hard to tell.

Already this year, President Biden has proposed $6 trillion in new spending, above and beyond the normal budget. The Six Trillion Dollar Man and his party truly seem to want to remake the economy — from not-COVID relief to not-infrastructure spending to using his “American Families Plan” (AFP) to have the federal government replace the family. It’s cradle-to-grave government, and it destroys the fabric of our constitutional Republic — not to mention handicapping the jobs market.

How is Biden doing this? Well, for example, his AFP includes $200 billion to take young children from their parents even earlier, putting them in government preschools — for “free.” If you prefer not sending your rug rats to preschool, there’s money for childcare. Or, if you’d prefer to stay home, there’s paid family leave. And if you’d like to continue your child’s education after 13 15 years of government work, there’s $109 billion for two years of “free” community college. Anything for trade schools or vocational training? Nope.

Biden and other Democrats have so thoroughly redefined the word “infrastructure” that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the AFP “personal infrastructure.” Others call it “human infrastructure.” We call it good old-fashioned income redistribution.

By the way, in order to bring on a handful of Republicans for the veneer of “bipartisanship,” or to at least assuage the concerns of a few nervous Democrats, Biden & Co. are pitching breaking up the infrastructure bill into smaller pieces so it doesn’t seem too radical.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has a counterproposal: “We’re open to doing a roughly $600 billion package which deals with what all of us agree is infrastructure and to talk about how to pay for that in any way other than reopening the 2017 tax-reform bill,” he said. “If it’s going to be about infrastructure, let’s make it about infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, there’s one glaring exception to Biden’s spending binge and “infrastructure” redefinition: national defense. This is one of the few spending areas specifically authorized by the Constitution, yet Democrats regularly give it short shrift because it cuts into their voter-buying welfare state. Yes, there’s a 1.6% increase in the Pentagon’s budget in Biden’s proposal, but the intrepid economists inhabiting the Beltway keep telling us inflation is right around 2% (insert maniacal laughter here), which means the Pentagon’s spending power actually goes down.

It’s difficult in this limited space to encapsulate just how detrimental Biden’s spending plans really are. But Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger takes a stab at explaining the big picture. “The Democratic Party has given up on the American dream,” he says. “This isn’t about the culture wars or standard Keynesian stimulus spending. The Biden plan is about public policies that will redesign American society.”

Trillions of dollars spent to “eradicate” poverty since the Great Society haven’t worked. Yet Democrats keep doing the same things and expecting different results.

Ultimately, Democrats are also redefining the word “entitlement.” Well, not so much redefining it as refusing to use it to describe their big initiatives to create government dependency. That’s what this $6 trillion is all about.