During the 2020 campaign season, Republicans warned of a socialist regime that would come if there were to be a Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress.
This message especially resonated with Venezuelan and Cuban Americans in south Florida, where Republicans succeeded in flipping two congressional Democratic seats, Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, while also increasing Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in Florida by three points from 2016.
With $6 trillion in proposed spending in his first 100 days, government payments to workers while businesses struggle to find employees, and a southern border crisis that neither President Biden nor Vice-President Harris are willing to touch, even some Republicans are surprised by the speed with which Democrats have moved the country toward a full-blown socialist open-border nation.
When the liberal New York Times leads with the headline, “Biden, Calling for Big Government, Bets on a Nation Tested by Crisis,” you know what they really mean is the largest expansion of Washington taxing, spending and federal bureaucracy. FDR, architect of the New Deal, and LBJ, father of the Great Society, would blush at the mere thought of proposing such a monstrosity to the American people. Bill Clinton proclaimed 25 years ago that “the era of big government is over.”
That view is rejected by today’s Democratic Party. To the contrary, their answer to every issue is more government spending and control over the everyday lives of Americans while pushing policies that go further left than at any point in our history.
President Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which he unveiled last week at the Joint Session of Congress, includes many new entitlements that are here to stay: Free Universal Pre-K for all 3-and 4-year-olds regardless of family income, even if one or both parents do not work (cost $200 billion); two years of free community college (cost $109 billion); and capping child care expenses at 7% of family income, an idea most likely to cause a spike in the cost of care programs that would be subsidized by the federal government (cost $225 billion).
Add to this the $1.9 trillion partisan COVID-19 stimulus bill that passed in March, and Mr. Biden’s proposed $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan cloaked under the guise of infrastructure spending, and the country is looking at spending bills that exceed $6 trillion. Take a moment to try and wrap your mind around that. An amount that is more than the entire federal budget in 2020. And this is all in just Mr. Biden’s first 100 days!
Where’s all this money coming from? Higher personal, business and investment income taxes; higher business and corporate taxes, and even increased death taxes. If President Biden’s planned tax increases go into effect, the U.S. will have the highest corporate tax rate of all the industrialized nations. That’s right — higher than France, Germany and Canada which have long imposed some of the highest tax rates in the world. And the kicker is that no one can say for certain that all of these big tax increases will come close to covering the cost of all these programs. In fact, most expert economists say they will not.
Millions of children are still not in schools as teachers are being paid their full salaries to work from home, unless you’re in one of 12 states, like Florida and South Dakota, where the governors have ordered the schools to open. Restaurants across the country are struggling to re-open, not because they don’t have customers, but because they don’t have workers. Many employers believe this is because they are competing with government payments that make staying home a financial win.
Inflation fears have prompted Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to warn the fed might have to raise interest rates to cool rising prices in the face of massive new government spending. Just look at the skyrocketing price of gas, up 22.5% since January, slated to increase to 34% by July.
Food prices like eggs and meat have increased 3-5 percent, the largest increase in 30 years. Commodity prices, from lumber and aluminum, to corn and steel, have surged 10-20 percent in recent months due to inflation and pent-up demand. The National Association of Home Builders says the four-fold increase in the price of wallboard alone will add $36,000 to the cost of an average new single-family home.
We are witnessing a slew of progressive Democrats’ economic policies, which are disconnected from economic reality, wedded with a drive to consolidate as much power in the hands of Washington politicians and bureaucrats while creating ever greater dependence on the government for free money and more social programs. These are the ingredients for a top-down imposition of socialism on a country still struggling to recover from a pandemic that dealt a body blow to its economy. Mr. Biden’s proposals might very well be the knockout punch that flattens it.
*story by The Washington Times
