Bernie Sanders may be the most influential presidential loser since Barry Goldwater. While the late Arizona senator lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide, his ideas took hold of the Republican Party and bloomed under Ronald Reagan. Sanders didn’t even secure the Democrat nomination, having been thwarted twice by the DNC, and yet one could be forgiven for thinking that Vermont’s tax-and-spend socialist “independent” has been running Joe Biden’s administration the whole time.

Biden released his latest budget proposal yesterday, and it’s a $6.9 trillion behemoth that Sanders will be proud of. Biden calls for raising taxes by $4.7 trillion over 10 years so that he can still increase the $31 trillion debt by another $17 trillion.

And he has the gall to claim to be a deficit cutter.

The CBO recently projected that the debt will increase $20 trillion over the next 10 years. Biden plans to jack up taxes and increase spending, the combination of which he claims will somehow knock $3 trillion off that $20 trillion — ergo, he’s “reducing the deficit.” Unfortunately for all of us, his funny math will never actually add up.

We won’t get into the weeds of Biden’s proposed spending today, other than to highlight two things: First, Biden promises “to extend Medicare for another generation” by … doing nothing to fix Medicare. Oh, he wants to raise the payroll tax for the highest earners and ration prescription drugs, along with cutting waste and fraud — something no one else has ever thought to do. But Medicare and Social Security, which combined with interest on the debt will reach 79% of federal spending by 2033, will be intentionally left on a course to insolvency.

Second, Biden would jack up federal spending to 25.2% of GDP, which is far ahead of the 21% average over the half-century he’s dwelt in The Swamp.

With that said, we’ll focus on Biden’s massive tax hikes.

Right up front, the part he and his part will trumpet is that he wants to stop any tax increases for households below the magical $400,000 annual threshold. He may or may not tell you that’s an extension of the tax cuts Republicans led by Paul Ryan crafted and Donald Trump signed. Democrats have been screaming for years that the GOP only cut taxes for “the rich,” so to admit that those cuts applied to every bracket would belie that claim.

Yet Biden wants to extend the Trump rates, which expire in 2025, “in a fiscally responsible manner” by raising taxes pretty much everywhere else. Just don’t think for a moment that won’t affect anyone in the under-$400K brackets. “I’m gonna raise some taxes,” he promised recently. Understatement of the year.

Implement a wealth tax! Raise capital gains taxes! Raise payroll taxes for Medicare! Put surtaxes on your taxes! Raise corporate taxes! Raise oil and gas taxes! Raise stock buyback taxes! Raise the top rate to the highest in 40 years! Raise other random taxes all over the place! Sic the IRS on the middle class!

It’s almost like he decided junk fees are great as long as they’re taxes.

What Biden doesn’t tell you is that a wealth tax will suppress investment and jobs, on top of being arguably unconstitutional because no income has been realized before money is taxed. He doesn’t tell you that higher capital gains taxes will actually reduce federal revenue as people change their investment strategies. He doesn’t tell you that raising taxes on corporations actually reduces wages and raises prices, or that gouging those above $400,000 a year hits small business owners — and thus their employees — hardest.

We suppose Biden has decided that the best way to fight the inflation he created with the American Rescue Plan is to tax Americans so heavily that they no longer have any money to spend. Demand could collapse and the economy may slide into recession, but hey, prices might come down. That’s assuming the continued upward trajectory of spending doesn’t keep inflation persistently high.

“With tax collections already at an all-time high,” marveled Mike Pence, “there is simply not much additional revenue that can be squeezed out of American taxpayers.” That won’t stop Biden from trying.

“The only good news,” say the editors of The Wall Street Journal, “is that this plan is a political document with no chance of passing this Congress, and exists mainly to bludgeon Republicans as wanting to push seniors off their retirement ice floes. But partial points to Team Biden for the preview of the punitive taxes a European entitlement state requires.”