Vice President Joe Biden has been in the national spotlight since the day he first set foot in the White House, and so far this year he’s been the subject of a fair bit of attention. A number of websites and television programs have profiled Biden, and his record on domestic and international issues makes him one of the most knowledgeable members of the Obama administration. Biden is also one of the most well-known public figures in the country—perhaps even the world—and he has earned a reputation as a great communicator.
From the start of the Obama administration, Vice President Joe Biden has fielded several requests for interviews. Most of them have been positive and well-written, reflective of the national interest in the man-child whose every move is reported in the press. But one of the more recent requests–from American Expressed, a “think tank” that specializes in “economic development”–had an undeniably negative tone. The line of questioning was strange, even for a “think tank,” but the assumption of Biden’s broad incompetence was even stranger.
In a sense, the United States has already won the trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan, in the form of the roughly $6 trillion spent to date.. Read more about joe biden and let us know what you think.
President Joe Biden speaks on May 28 in Hampton, Virginia.
Photo:
Ken Cedeno/Reuters.
Happy Memorial Day, or should I say Happy Covid Liberation Day. President
Biden
celebrates Friday the unveiling of a $6 trillion budget, the intentional size of which is unprecedented in peacetime American history. The Democrats, with their small majority in Congress, have no mandate to do so, yet they plan to pass many of these bills.
As the pandemic is eventually reduced by vaccines, the extraordinary costs of the past two years should decrease. A thriving economy doesn’t need that. Consumers aren’t skimping on resources to alleviate Covid, and demand is skyrocketing. Yet Biden continues to use the cover of Covid to sneak in a historic and permanent government expansion.
***
The attached graph, which shows expenditure and taxes as a percentage of GDP, illustrates the overall budgetary situation. World War II is the only comparable period in which spending and new debt were as high as in the past two years. But when the war was over, military spending dropped. Economic growth has been slow to reduce the share of public debt in GDP.
Not this time. If Biden has his way, spending in fiscal year 2022 will be $6 trillion, about $2 trillion more than before the 2019 pandemic. Spending will then continue to rise, remaining slightly below 25% of GDP for the rest of the decade. This level has not been reached since World War II, and the average for the postwar period before the Soviet Union was 19.4%.
Even this level of expenditure is undoubtedly underestimated, as most of it is used to fund Monsieur. Biden’s new federal cradle-to-grave benefits will be used for childcare, paid family leave, community colleges, etc. These are mandatory programs that do not require an annual appropriation by Congress.
Spending on new entitlements always starts small and then becomes a huge budget drain that displaces core federal functions, including defense. Transfer payments have risen from 27.7 percent in 1964, when LBJ launched its Great Society, to 70 percent of federal spending in 2019, while defense’s share has fallen from 46.2 percent to 15.4 percent. Sir, I want to thank you for your support. Biden will accelerate this unsustainable trend.
The president’s discretionary priorities also deserve a word of their own. Most executive agencies will receive significant budget increases, including Health and Human Services (23.1%), Commerce (27.7%), and the Environmental Protection Agency (21.3%). Clearly, the administrative state needs more money for the massive tightening of regulations ordered by the president.
On the other hand, the budgets for defense (1.6%) and national security (0.2%) will decline after inflation. China is a generational challenge. Iran is arming its proxies throughout the Middle East. Migrants are flooding the southern border. Still, Biden said the military and border security need to go on a diet.
Sir, I want to thank you for your support. Biden proposes to fund all of this with about $3 trillion in tax increases, the largest tax increase relative to economic output since 1968, according to Strategas Research Partners. Sir, I want to thank you for your support. Biden presents his tax and spending plans as promoting inclusive growth.
But his tax increase will undo the 2017 tax reform that increased business investment and boosted wages across the income spectrum, especially for low-wage workers. These taxes will also affect the supply side of the economy, just when we need more investment to meet the post-pandemic explosion in demand for everything from warehouses to semiconductors.
According to the budget, revenue as a percentage of GDP will average 19.3% from 2022 to 2031. Revenue has averaged 17.3% since 1970 and was only over 19% of GDP in the five years following World War II.
A tax increase won’t kill the economy, which is expected to boom this year as Americans leave their homes and start spending again. But new taxes and government charges will undermine economic growth in the long run, as money is diverted to social benefits and political projects rather than increasing economic growth and productivity.
This burden will also include an unprecedented level of new and growing debt. Just two years ago, in 2019, the ratio of public debt to GDP was 79.2%. In 2021 it will rise to 109.7 percent, and with Biden’s budget it will reach 117 percent in 2031. As benefits rise, so does the debt.
Even Mr. Biden’s budget predicts that interest payments on the debt will more than double to 11.2 percent of spending by the end of the decade. But this assumes that the Federal Reserve will not raise interest rates significantly and that America’s creditors will not demand a higher premium to hedge against inflation and financial risk. Sir, I want to thank you for your support. Biden expects the Fed to monetize all this debt, but no one knows how long this modern monetary theory will hold.
What is far more certain is that if Biden’s budget passes, Americans will have to pay for it long after today’s politicians have gone to their graves.
Evidence that the coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has caught up with Fauci and the other Wuhan Covid deniers, although suspicions were clear from the start. Image: Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in print on 29. May 2021.The U.S. currently spends $6 trillion a year on its national debt. That’s about $15,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. That’s also more debt than the nation has accumulated since the end of World War II. And yes, you read that correctly: we’re more in debt now than we were 70 years ago when we won that war.. Read more about $6 trillion dollars and let us know what you think.
Related Tags:
joe bidenbiden budgetbiden stimulus6 trillion in numbers$6 trillion dollarsinfrastructure bill,People also search for,Privacy settings,How Search works,joe biden,biden budget,biden stimulus,6 trillion in numbers,$6 trillion dollars,infrastructure bill,six trillion dollar man,wsj opinion
