The Patriot Post® · Moderate Joe's $6 Trillion Tax-and-Spend Plan
The Six Trillion Dollar Man is at it again. After pitching $6 trillion in new spending already in his short presidency, Joe Biden released his budget today and it’s — you guessed it — also $6 trillion. And you’re going to pay for it.
Now, first of all, presidential budgets are largely symbolic. Congress does its own thing, while the president merely gets to hold up a sign signifying his priorities. Yet Biden’s budget, which incorporates much of his already-proposed big spending projects from his so-called “American Jobs Plan” and “American Families Plan,” is hugely significant because it shows yet again that while voters thought they were electing a moderate, they instead got a less coherent version of Bernie Sanders. Biden’s not so great society wealth redistribution plan is a statist behemoth.
We hate to say we told you so.
Let’s start with how Biden’s budget will be “paid for.” We put that in scare quotes for good reason, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Naturally, Biden calls for major tax increases. First, he wants to raise income taxes on households earning more than $400,000, which technically violates his campaign pledge to not raise taxes on individuals earning less than $400,000. Neither threshold sounds very “middle class” to most Americans, and “fair share” taxation polls well, so Democrats figure they can get away with it. Just remember that the initial income tax in 1917 was never supposed to hit the middle class either.
Moreover, Democrats intend for the 2017 Republican rates for everyone to expire in 2025. As even the New York Times admits, that means tax hikes for everyone.
Meanwhile, Biden and his progressive pal Elizabeth Warren want to boost IRS enforcement, hoping to generate $70 billion more annual revenue through catching tax cheats and closing loopholes. A bigger, more powerful IRS? What could go wrong?
Yet where Biden really wants to pick the pockets of Americans already faced with the Carter-esque malaise of rampant inflation is a hefty hike in the corporate income tax rate, from 21% to 28%. Anyone who doesn’t think businesses will raise prices to pay for that tax bill doesn’t know anything about economics.
As far as “paying for” anything, even assuming the unlikely event that these tax hikes will actually generate the projected revenue, deficits will explode.
When Bill Clinton infamously declared in his 1996 State of the Union Address that the “era of big government is over,” he then submitted to Congress his FY1997 budget, which totaled $1.6 trillion. Joe Biden’s deficit will be $1.8 trillion, and it will remain above $1.3 trillion each year for a decade.
“Total debt held by the public would more than exceed the annual value of economic output, rising to 117 percent of the size of the economy in 2031,” the Times also reports. “By 2024, debt as a share of the economy would rise to its highest level in American history, eclipsing a World War II-era record.”
Former President Donald Trump was no fiscal hawk. Spending grew yugely on his watch, and we criticized him for it. But Biden and the Democrats are doing what they always do — exploiting a crisis to raise the spending floor for their “investments” that greatly expand the welfare state and make government increasingly bigger every year.
No wonder Biden warned Republicans not to “get in the way” of his spending initiatives. Presumably he means to dismiss the GOP’s still-absurd $928 billion infrastructure counteroffer. Biden’s plan has come down a bit from $2.3 trillion to a mere $1.7 trillion, and Republicans made their pitch on Thursday to finally do something bipartisan.
Don’t hold your breath, because $6 Trillion Joe is no moderate bringing unity.