Joe Biden has proposed a $6 Trillion budget for next year… it’ll wind up being more than 6T, but let’s take him at his word for the purposes of this discussion.
That’s a lot of money, Joe!
But don’t worry you guys, Ole Joe promises that our deficit will “only” be $1.8 Trillion this year, and in 2030 even as the budget bloats to $8 Trillion, the deficit will somehow “fall” to $1.6 Trillion.
Uh-huh…
It doesn’t take College-level calculus to smell the bullshit in this latest Government spending fairy tale.
First, some history: We notched our first Trillion dollar budget in 1987 and it took 15 years for the budget to swell to $2 Trillion. But as anyone who has ever wrestled with a runaway credit card balance knows, debt escalates slowly and then all at once. We hit $3 Trillion 7 years later and then $4 Trillion 8 years after that. We cruised in the 4s for only a year before the highly unusual event of a once-a-century pandemic bounced us up over $6 Trillion. (But it’s important to note that much of that spending was supposed to be a one-time reaction to the COVID emergency and had Trump won in 2020 there is every reason to expect that number would have begun to trickle back down to 4).
But along came Biden and now there’s no looking back. Despite the end of the pandemic emergency, Biden has no intention of rolling the budget back from the edge of the $6 Trillion cliff. On the contrary, he’s stepping on the gas, and by the time 2030 rolls around (8 years from now) we will have blown past 5, 6, and 7 and landed precariously on an $8 Trillion budget precipice. What the National Debt will have swelled to by that time is anybody’s guess.
You know, there was a lot of talk about Obama wanting to fundamentally transform the Nation, but to the extent he was serious about it, he sure went about it in a half-assed way… one piece of bad legislation at a time… an Obamacare here, a Title IX guidance there… but it never even occured to him to try and turn the nation into a Neo-Feudalist State.
There have been a lot of different movie versions of the ROBIN HOOD story over the years, but all of them share one critical element. Prince John and his loyalists get rich and fat on the back of the onerous taxes they extract from their subjects. The Feudal subjects themselves are reduced to lives of subsistence farming as they starve in their homes and try desperately to hide whatever they can from the ravenous tax collectors so that their families can survive another day. And crucially, the best-paid jobs in the Realm, the ones that have the best job security, are the ones that pay folks to harrass the citizenry on behalf of the King. Just as no Government Employee missed a paycheck during the COVID lockdowns, the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men never missed a meal even as their neighbors starved in their homes. That’s how they were so easily co-opted into becoming agents of Royal oppression. “Oppress your neighbors on my behalf,” Prince John ordered, “or starve right alongside them.” In the modern era, those who work for (and are paid by) the alphabet soup of government agencies that actually control every aspect of our lives, have taken the place of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s tax collectors.
Because a government spending $6-8 Trillion a year is a Government that is absolutely starving for tax revenue, it will seek out that revenue wherever It can, and good intentions be damned. We all know the idea that you can fully fund an $8 Trillion government simply by taxing the rich is a fantasy (even ultra-Liberal Vox is willing to tacitly admit this fact)… do you know how we know that? because we have five years of evidence to prove that we can’t even finance a $4 Trillion government by taxing the rich. Despite two decades of demonizing the Rich for not paying their “far share” we’ve never collected more than $3.75 Trillion in tax revenue. And so the burden to cover the gap between $3.75T and $6T will fall on the rest of us, as it always does. More and more money will be pulled out of the private sector economy and dumped into the vast Governmental washing machine of fraud, waste and abuse. Individual ctizens at all levels of income will pull back on spending and investing out of fear of a dark economic future, and growth will suffer… all that will lead to lower and lower tax revenues and higher and higher deficits until something really bad happens.
And when that bad thing happens, millions of terrified and suffering Americans will beg the Government for help and the Government will be only too happy to oblige. “The free market has failed you!” they’ll say, “it’s time for a Government takeover of everything!”
From there it’s a pretty short run to Gulags and purges.
Fundamental Transformation, indeed.
It’ll make for great TV though.