The Surrender Budget

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President Biden’s budget has drawn a lot of flack from conservatives. Larry Kudlow notes that it would put the country on the path to a growth recession. The Wall Street Journal points out that it would essentially require the Federal Reserve to maintain abnormally low interest rates for a decade. A troubled domestic economy notwithstanding, the worst thing about this budget is the national security implications — it risks putting Communist China into the passing lane.

This might have been overlooked by the press because President Biden released his budget proposal on Friday, just before Memorial Day. The maneuver, Mr. Kudlow has pointed out, is standard tactics designed to bury a story. This is certainly a budget proposal that deserves burial. One might almost suggest cremation except these massive tax increases deserve to be buried unurned.

Mr. Biden’s Memorial Day gift to Americans was a tax increase in virtually every aspect of life. There were increases in income taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and estate taxes. That is evident without even reading the fine print. It’s so crosswise with economic logic as to suggest that Mr. Biden, despite his claims of unifying rhetoric, seeks to elevate class warfare to a national budget priority? Doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that it has been demonstrated time and again that lowering taxes creates growth, while raising taxes stymies growth. President Coolidge’s tax cuts led to the roaring 20s, Kennedy’s to the booming 60s; Reagan’s to the soaring 80s and beyond; and President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts led to the superb pre-pandemic economic growth and to full employment.

On the flip side, Presidents Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt raised taxes and sustained them throughout the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s policies were so misguided that he even deepened the Depression (who would have thought it possible?), which became tragically apparent in 1937 and 1938, when, well into the New Deal, America found itself beset by the “depression within a depression.”

So Mr. Biden’s budget proposal, if history is any guide, will be a growth killer. To be fair, the President is almost honest about this. He is projecting economic growth of only 1.9%. That’s pretty anemic. And since these are his numbers, it wouldn’t be surprising were it to turn out that they exaggerate what growth they really expect.

It’s bad enough to spend all this time and effort on a budget that is destined to produce almost no economic improvement for most Americans and for America herself. However dispiriting that might be, though, it becomes even worse, and more dangerous, when one puts it in its international context. Particularly because of Communist China.

It turns out that while America is projecting to grow, at best, at 1.9% a year, Communist China is projecting to grow at around 6% as far as economists can see. At those relative growth rates, by the end of the budget period, 10 years out, China’s GDP would have grown by roughly 80% and then roughly equal the United States. In other words, China would make up all the ground that today separates the two economies.

What does that mean? Should the United States fail to grow — not an impossibility given Mr. Biden’s war on wealth and capital — China would have essentially surpassed the United States by the end of the budget period. And bear in mind that national security is as much a function of economic strength as it is of military strength. It’s conceivable that the U.S. could grow faster than 1.9%, but if so, it would be an accident rather than a function of the budget Biden has designed.

Which is why I suggest calling Mr. Biden’s fiscal folly the Surrender Budget. His plans might be a bad news budget for America, but it’s great news for China. I know we import a lot of things from China — pet toys, Walmart fashions, viruses — but it never occurred to me that we might adopt a budget that might as well have been made in Beijing.

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Mr. Childs is a private investor based in Florida.


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