No president has ever proposed a more egregiously misnamed piece of legislation than President Joe Biden's so-called Build Back Better plan. The label "Progressive-Democrats" chose for this European-style socialist legislation is an example of their favorite ploy: semantic subterfuge -- assigning an appealing name to an appalling concept.
In reality, the plan is a socialist wealth redistribution ploy to erode America's free market economy and replace it with government control, burdensome regulations and even higher taxes. When it comes to building back better, what Biden and the Democrats need to rebuild are the successful policies of the previous administration they destroyed in less than a year.
If Biden and his socialist puppet masters want to build America back better, they should start by cleaning up the mess they made of the booming economy they inherited. Biden and company could revive our now heavily inflated, failing economy by eliminating hundreds of burdensome regulations he imposed during his first days in office. Allowing our fossil-fuel infrastructure to restore energy independence would ease our "pain at the pump." Protecting Americans from patent and intellectual property theft would help American businesses thrive.
Building back better should also include restoring America's credibility. Biden's callous, incompetent surrender in Afghanistan means we must urgently refocus our military on real threats from Communist China and Iran and cease force-feeding our troops a diet of social-justice tripe.
We must also reestablish our southern border. Sequestering two million illegal immigrants in our country by year-end is an enormous economic burden. It also makes us a global laughingstock.
The best way Biden and his leftist fellow travelers can build our country back better is to stop pushing socialist policies, continually expanding government, raising taxes, increasing regulations, encouraging unemployment and running small businesses out of business. Unfortunately, none of this will happen.
The House of Representatives passed the misnamed Build Back Better Act on Nov. 19 by a vote of 220 to 213. The legislation should be more appropriately labelled the Build Up Government Act.
On the day Build Back Better passed in the House, the federal government cost taxpayers $2.13 million per minute. This cost grows every day Biden is in office. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Build Back Better will increase America's burgeoning federal deficit by $367 billion.
Dan Mitchell and Robert O'Quinn, writing for the Club for Growth Foundation, make additional points about the Build Back Better plan:
The actual cost will be $5 trillion, not the $1.75 trillion claimed by Biden and company.
The plan is financed by punitive, class-warfare taxes undermining savings, investment and entrepreneurship while diverting badly needed resources from the productive sector of our economy.
Over the next 10 years, the plan will cost Americans $3 trillion in economic output, $1.6 trillion in worker pay, a decrease of more than $10,000 in per-worker income and a 4% decline in Americans' standard of living.
Biden's Build Back Better plan is a massive socialist fraud perpetrated by leftist ideologues who must believe Venezuela, where inflation is now more than 1,000% and people fight over scraps of food from garbage cans, is a Utopian paradise rather than a dystopian disaster.
We warned this would happen in a Biden administration in our book, "We Didn't Fight for Socialism -- America's Veterans Speak Up." Biden accepted the socialists' "green game plan" of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and added to it.
If this bill passes the U.S. Senate, our grandchildren will be forced to endure a diminished quality of life unseen in America since the Great Depression. We The People must tell our U.S. Senators, "Vote No!"
Oliver L. North is a combat-decorated U.S. Marine, No.1 bestselling author, founder and CEO of Fidelis Publishing LLC and Fidelis Media LLC. Find out more about him at www.olivernorth.com. David Goetsch is a Marine Corps veteran, member of the Florida Veteran's Hall of Fame, professor of business, Christian counselor, and author of 77 books. Find out more about him at www.david-goetsch.com. Order their new book, "We Didn't Fight for Socialism" at www.olivernorth.com or Amazon.com.
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