Joe’s All-Bull ‘Budget’
The release of President Biden’s latest monstrous budget “plan” (largely a reprise of last year’s) proves BankBreaker Joe is still at it — happy to promise the moon to buy his way to victory, all fiscal responsibility be damned. None of the numbers really means anything, it’s just a “vision” of how he’d spend $7.3 trillion in one year, to be offset with $5.5 trillion in tax hikes.
There’s massive green spending (beloved by the Dem base), like $23 billion in “climate adaptation and resilience” across an alphabet soup of fed agencies, $7.5 billion for “rural renewable energy projects” (jam the wind and solar farms in the sticks: They’re not voting Democratic, anyway) and some $1.5 billion for “environmental justice efforts” (green pork for urban activists, for sure).
A scheme for price controls to magically cap out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 for all private health plans, pitched as a bribe to 189 million Americans if any of the details actually worked (in a “budget plan,” of course, such questions are out of bounds).
A move to kill the origination fee on federal student loans, costing about $19 billion over the next 10 years. Hey, it wouldn’t be a Biden budget without a student-loan giveaway, even if higher-end families get most of the benefits.
An unprecedented $258 billion on “affordable” housing, including $10 billion to help homebuyers whose parents don’t own homes — in other words, a naked bribe to the less well-off locked out of the housing market by the massive interest rates that Biden’s policies have produced.
How does the president pretend to pay for all this? By slamming corporations and billionaires, of course. He’d hike the minimum tax rate for billion-dollar companies to 21% and the general corporate tax rate to 28%, while adding punitive taxes on stock buybacks and a supposed “wealth tax,” a 25% minimum income tax for people with net worth above $100 million.
None of this is stuff he tried to actually pass when Dems controlled Congress his first two years; at least some of it (like the wealth tax) is blatantly unconstitutional; it’s got as much to do with reality as Biden’s whoppers about his teen faceoff with gang leader “Corn Pop” or his insistence he never had a thing to do with son Hunter’s “business.”
It’s a campaign document, and not even a serious one. And like everything else Biden has done to try stanch the electoral bleeding — blaming the GOP for the border crisis he caused; denouncing Israel’s “excesses” in Gaza to appease pro-Hamas Democrats — it’s desperate, foolish and utterly partisan.
It makes gestures to salve the wounds that Biden’s actual actions have inflicted on the nation, but fails to address the main problems voters face today: sky-high prices on essentials and equally stratospheric interest rates.
This plan, with its massive handouts, would only drive prices up and thus force the Fed to keep rates high. So as economics, it’s nonsense; as politics, it’s just a pack of symbols meant to show that Biden stands for . . . exactly the same things he has since taking office.
In other words, he’s vowing to deliver more of what he already has, which should give every American the chills.