Biden budget an impractical wishlist

Akey problem with President Joe Biden’s $6 trillion budget proposal is not that it fails to take aim at real problems, but that the president seems to think spending doesn’t have price tags. Without a doubt, the nation needs to invest in roads, water systems, the electric grid, bridges and other traditional infrastructure that have suffered from decades of neglect as well as in the cutting-edge infrastructure of broadband Internet to help Americans learn, compete and achieve economic mobility.

Still, taxpayers have every reason to choke on a budget that is basically a wishlist as impractical as the birthday demands of a child who has no appreciation of the value of money.

There is no way around the fact that $6t is a massive amount of money, regardless of whether a portion is paid for with new taxes and revenue from the expiration of the Trump-era tax cuts. Debt as a percentage of the economy would be higher than when the country was fighting World War II, and rising budget deficits will be a reality for decades.

Therein lies the problem – the flawed belief that debt doesn’t matter, which is true until it isn’t.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget rightly notes that the ‘‘budget takes too long to pay for his initiatives and does little to address our high and rising debt, lower health care costs, or secure major trust funds headed toward insolvency’’. But that is only a portion of the problem. Taxes went down for most Americans under Trump’s tax relief package, but will go back up and more – the opposite of what Biden promised on the campaign trail.