Biden’s Bread and Circuses Budget 

The president hopes class warfare and populism will help him sail to reelection, but it charts a course to run America straight into the rocks.

AP/Evan Vucci
President Biden speaks about his 2024 budget proposal on March 9, 2023, at Philadelphia. AP/Evan Vucci

President Biden is touting his new budget, promising sugar and spice and everything nice while singing the socialist siren song: He’ll force “billionaires” to pay for it while shrinking the deficit. Mr. Biden hopes this class warfare and populism will help him sail to reelection, but it charts a course to run America straight into the rocks.

It’s fortunate that one thing holds true for all presidents: Their budgets never survive the House of Representatives. In 1986, the Reagan Administration poked fun at Democratic claims that his budget was “dead on arrival,” hiring an ambulance to drive it down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to show it still had life in it, but Mr. Biden’s budget is all bread and circuses.

The Republican congressman from Louisiana, James “Mike” Johnson, said Mr. Biden is proposing increases “in spending with no solution for how to fund it except raising taxes, and you can’t do that in a period of high inflation,” but when you’re printing money, the price of buying votes is cheap.

 The AP opens its story on the budget with an acknowledgement that it’s about politics not fiscal sanity, noting that, “with an eye on 2024,” Mr. Biden unveiled “his election-year budget plan this week in must-win Pennsylvania.”

 Mr. Biden talks of billionaires paying their “fair share.” The top 1 percent of wage earners pay about half of all income taxes, yet he tells the bottom 99 percent that this is unfair. The non-billionaires are where the votes are, but their pockets also contain the money Mr. Biden’s budget lusts to redistribute, something he ignores on the stump.

Even Elon Musk’s fortune, $186 billion, is a fraction of the more than $522 billion the federal government spent each month in 2022, and you can only slice open a golden goose once. Besides, billionaires are a very mobile group. If just a few pull up stakes, it would be a net loss for the Treasury regardless of the higher rate.

Mr. Biden also decries “tax loopholes” and rages against Republican tax reform by Presidents George W. Bush and Trump, ignoring that the top 1 percent were paying a ten percent greater share of income taxes in 2020 than they did in 2001 according to the Tax Foundation while the bottom 50 percent’s share fell by more than half.

Politico reports, “Biden’s budget won’t feature tax increases on anyone making less than $400,000 but is expected to call for boosting taxes for billionaires,” sidestepping that one need not “call for” tax hikes on certain citizens to ensure that they’ll foot the bill. The stealth tax of inflation is ravaging the poor even as Mr. Biden throws gasoline on the fire.

Two weeks ago in the Sun, I wrote a column likening Mr. Biden’s false claims of fiscal responsibility to the Republican congressman from New York, George Santos, but pointed out that while both lie, the president alone is doing damage, spending us down the highway to hell while telling us it’s the stairway to heaven.

Mr. Biden’s latest “budget proposal aims to cut deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade,” the AP reports, “significantly higher than the $2 trillion that Biden had promised in his State of the Union address last month.” This is another favorite Biden lie, according to CNN: He increased the national debt by $4 trillion yet claims to have reduced it.

 Maybe it’s too much to expect a man who never had a job in the private sector — Mr. Biden’s “Santosing” up claims of being a tractor trailer driver notwithstanding — to grow into the Oval Office and offer a budget that’s more than what NPR called “a cudgel” to beat up Republicans, but that’s the job the American people expect a president to do.

President Hayes once said, “He who serves his country best serves his party best.” Mr. Biden’s budget serves the Democratic Party alone, so it falls to the House Republican to think of the nation. They can do so by calling out the ambulance again and telling it not to bother with the siren. Mr. Biden’s budget is dead on arrival.


The New York Sun

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