Move over, Woodrow Wilson. Take a seat, Barack Obama. Let him through, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Based on last week’s $6 trillion budget proposal, Joe Biden has surpassed all of those liberal icons to take a position at the head of the pack as the most extreme radical ever to inhabit the White House. Were Biden to succeed in turning his budget proposal into reality, he would more radically transform the nation than those previous presidents combined.
The Biden budget will not be enacted as is. And, because the document itself reveals that not only will it not fix our current challenges, it will actually exacerbate them, it cannot be taken as a serious budget proposal.
Nevertheless, the document is valuable, if only as a statement of the Biden Administration’s (and, hence, Biden's) values and priorities. Biden himself has said it on a number of occasions, attributing the quote to his father: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Or, as Biden’s budget document says in its opening line: “Where we choose to invest speaks to what we value as a Nation.”
So, what’s so radical about this statement of Biden’s values and priorities?
For starters, he proposes to spend more over the next decade than any previous president in history. Not just in nominal dollars, but as a percentage of the nation’s total output of goods and services. And not only does he propose to do so without paying for all that additional spending, he plans to do it on a record-setting pace: “Debt under the budget would hit new records almost every year,” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Just how high would the debt go? Within three years, by 2024, federal debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product would reach its highest level in history, surpassing the record set in World War II. By the end of fiscal year 2031, debt held by the public would rise to 117 percent of GDP, the federal government would spend $8.2 trillion, and the national debt would stand at $39 trillion, up from its current level of $28.4 trillion.
What does all that borrowing mean? Eventually, someone has to pay the tab, so Biden (or a successor) will propose massive tax increases (or hope the Fed will impose a tighter monetary policy). In fact, despite having famously promised never to raise taxes on any individual earning less than $400,000 per year, the Biden budget proposal leaves intact the current-law 2025 expiration of the individual tax cuts enacted in the 2017 Tax Cut & Jobs Act, including individual income taxes levied against middle-class taxpayers. Allowing those tax cuts to expire will have the functional effect of raising taxes on those taxpayers, Biden’s promise be damned.
It’s not just actual tax hikes that will take a bite out of our wallets, though – so will inflation, which will certainly increase as the result of this massive deficit spending. Purchasing power will diminish, hitting those on fixed incomes particularly hard.
The worst part is, the Biden budget proposal acknowledges in its own projections that all this front-loaded spending will not lead to greater productivity or growth in economic activity – the proposal projects a growth spurt in 2021 and 2022, before growth falls to just 2.2 percent in fiscal 2023, and then averages less than 2 percent for the following eight years. Contrary to the document’s opening line, Biden’s budget doesn’t “invest” as much as it merely “spends.” Words matter.
Still not convinced Biden deserves his place atop the pantheon of presidents who sought radical transformation?
Consider this: Since 1976, it has been established federal law that taxpayer funds are not spent on abortion, except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. The Hyde Amendment’s restrictions have been in place since Jimmy Carter was president, and no president – not Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton, not even Barack Obama – has sought to overturn that consensus policy. Until, that is, Joe Biden came along and proposed doing away with the ban on taxpayer funding of abortion in his budget document.
Or this: Biden’s budget proposes a 41 percent increase in funding for the Department of Education, including a new grant program to “foster diversity” in public schools – code words for critical race theory. He wants to use taxpayer dollars to pay unionized teachers to indoctrinate our children with insidious beliefs designed to undercut our Constitution and the foundations of our government.
This is not a serious budget proposal. It’s a radical one.