Biden, the Human Wrecking Ball: Make America Poor Again

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act Tuesday, March 23, 2021, at the Arthur James Cancer Hospital and the Richard Solove Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

One way conservatives have been looking at Joe Biden is that he is so boring that he could not possibly pose a problem for them. But a more honest assessment is that he is a fraud. Good Ol’ Joe, just a regular guy from Scranton, is now vying to become the next FDR.

“Heaven help us all,” writes Charles Cooke for NRO. After only 100 days of being president, there is scarcely a single part of American life that Biden isn’t trying to change.

The man who ran on a return to normalcy — and whose party avoided unified Republican government by only 90,000 votes — now says he wants to be FDR.

If anyone truly thinks that Biden is “boring,” it is because, having been intoxicated by the Trump Show, they are looking only at this president’s style.

At the latest count, the Biden administration wants to spend six-trillion new dollars:

to raise taxes to their highest level in three decades
to raise the minimum wage to $15 nationally
to turn the Senate into the House and turn the Supreme Court into the Senate
to oversee a federal takeover of elections and the police
to force as many workers as possible into unions
to ban right-to-work
to prohibit the most commonly owned rifle in the United States

On some of this, Biden is now open, but on much of it, he is not, warns Mr. Cooke.

That $2 trillion “COVID relief” bill you’ve heard about? It wasn’t really about COVID relief.

The “Infrastructure” bill? It’s not really about infrastructure.

The “Families” bill? You get the picture.

Nor are the contents described accurately. Two-hundred-billion dollars in new spending on Obamacare. That’s a “tax cut,” apparently. “No increase” in the estate tax? Well, unless you count the step-up basis, which is really the whole game.

It’s as if, having finally been elected president after 50 years in politics, Joe Biden has decided to push every priority his party ever failed to get through.

Francis Menton, aka The Manhattan Contrarian, asks, is there one of these proposals that makes sense? Will these proposals enhance the well-being of Americans? Will they solve all human problems and bring about perfect fairness and equity in human affairs?

The Elephant in the Room

In that the flood of proposed new programs and spending is so enormous as to make critiques of any individual items completely pointless, Mr. Menton addresses the “elephant in the room.” What never gets mentioned, he notes, is why have the vast numbers of already-existing federal social service programs and spending not succeeded in solving the problems they were created and funded to solve.

But anyway, now that we’re in the Biden era, we’re not so much concerned any more with little problems like poverty. Now that all limits are removed, we can pass out money to everybody indiscriminately (child tax credits for all!), or to people predominantly in the upper half of the income distribution (free college!) or even the upper ten percent (electric car charging stations!).

Our metrics for measuring the effects of all this spending are wholly inadequate to the task. As readers here know, government spending is immediately counted into income and GDP figures, with the destructive effects only showing up later, sometimes many years later. How much of the current surge in reported economic activity is the consequence of the illusionary inclusion of the blowout spending as supposedly representing economic growth? It’s impossible to tell.

Never forget that in Venezuela they were using similar measuring conventions to declare an “economic miracle” many years after the economic catastrophe had become clear to everyone on the ground.