“Moderate” President Joe Biden has decided to go full-on, 100 percent, rabid socialist. The Democrats in Congress are preparing to literally break the bank by authorizing $2 trillion in spending on America’s crumbling infrastructure. It will follow hot on the heels of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that is currently winding its way through Congress.
With the budget deficit for 2020 topping $3 trillion, Mr. Biden apparently wants to get 2021 off to a rousing start by drowning the American people in $4 trillion in cash — cash we don’t have, aren’t likely to have for decades, and that no one knows if we truly need.
“I think we need to go further than just the American Rescue Plan,” Schumer, a New York Democrat, said. “We need a strong stimulus to get our long-term economy going.”
The House is expected to vote this week on the $1.9 trillion package Democrats have labeled the American Rescue Plan. The Senate, Schumer said, will vote on the bill before mid-March.
After that, he said, lawmakers would “very soon” consider a major “Build Back Better” infrastructure and jobs package proposed by President Biden during his 2020 campaign.
The infrastructure bill would “fundamentally refigure the economy,” according to Axios. One way it could do that is by jacking up taxes on “the rich” in the most massive transfer of wealth in history.
And if you believe that money would go anywhere near the people who actually need it, I have a drawbridge over the Chicago River I’d like to sell you.
Obviously, raising taxes is a non-starter — unless Senate Democrats can use the reconciliation process to ram it through. The Democrats have only three shots in their reconciliation gun, being limited by law on how many times the process can be used in a legislative session. They will use the first on COVID relief. Senator Bernie Sanders appears to be all in for using reconciliation to pass an infrastructure bill.
- “If I have anything to say about it, it will, and I think the president wants it to happen,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said during an interview in the Capitol.
- Reconciliation requires only a simple 51-vote majority, rather than the usual 60 votes to pass major legislation.
- A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
Biden will keep that third shot and hold it for something really big — immigration reform or gun control legislation. Perhaps even some kind of Green New Deal bill, although the way Democrats are talking, there’s going to be plenty of green in the infrastructure bill.
The other side: Republicans dismiss the infrastructure bill as cover for a “radical” climate change proposal and question how the government can afford it.
Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, told Axios: “It’s actually going to turn into more of a climate change proposal that really placates their radical environmentalists. I think that that’s where you’re going to see the corporate tax raises.”
Republican Senator Joni Ernst said, “Where’s that money coming from? We might as well, you know, throw away infrastructure, throw away rural broadband, because after they spend all this money on the COVID package, there’s not going to be anything left.”
The money will come from the same place it always comes from: thin air.
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