Having spent 1.9 trillion borrowed dollars on a “COVID-19 relief” bill, only about 9 percent of which goes directly to fighting COVID-19, President Biden and the Democrats next reportedly want to spend another 3 trillion borrowed dollars on an “infrastructure rebuilding” bill.
And if you guessed that the response from their “progressive” wing was “That’s not enough!” then give yourself a box of Cuban cigars and send the bill to your grandkids.
There’s no denying that America needs to improve its infrastructure. We have bridges and overpasses collapsing, water pipes that are older than Joe Biden, and airports that are outdated by international standards.
Even President Trump wanted to spend money to update our infrastructure. But the difference between his push and the Democrats’ version is that he would have actually updated our infrastructure.
He was a builder, and as he has proved repeatedly, from the Wollman Ice Rink to Operation Warp Speed to his deregulation agenda, he knew how to get the government out of the way so that things could get done.
Under Obama/Biden, hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on “shovel-ready jobs,” only to have Obama later admit that there weren’t any. Construction projects remained hamstrung by government red tape while much of the money went to leftist pet projects, cronyism and keeping blue-state bureaucrats employed through the recession.
Now, Biden’s new proposal looks like the Obama version on steroids.
Only about a third of the $3 trillion would actually go to infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, rail lines, ports and the power grid. Here’s how some of the rest of it would be spent. As The Western Journal has chronicled:
“Biden wants to spend $400 billion to combat climate change, including $60 billion for green transit infrastructure and $46 billion for research and development. The plan also would aim to make electric-vehicle charging stations available across the country.”
We heard the “green jobs” line from Obama (remember how that worked out?), and Toyota just warned that we have nowhere near enough power-generating capacity to charge an all-electric car fleet, while Biden wants to do away with fossil fuels.
So what will all those charging stations connect to? Windmills?
According to The New York Times, the Biden administration also wants to create a massive collection of new programs, including free community college, universal pre-K education, a national paid-leave program, child care support, more subsidies for health insurance and more.
How much of that will be lumped into the “infrastructure” bill?
And of course, to prove they’re fiscally responsible (I’ll pause typing while you finish laughing), the Democrats would include a big tax increase, the last thing an economy struggling to recover from their never-ending COVID shutdowns needs.
Some economists are warning that by flooding a weak economy with borrowed money in a way that doesn’t strengthen real economic growth, Biden is steering America into a return of stagflation, the combination of inflation (rising prices) and a stagnant economy that made the Jimmy Carter years so miserable.
If so, then the only silver lining would be that maybe history will repeat itself.
Carter messed things up so badly that voters elected Ronald Reagan to fix it. So far, Biden’s policies have been like Carter’s on steroids, so maybe the next president will be like Reagan on steroids. Let’s hope so!
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
