(Oct. 28) From beginning to end, President Joe Biden’s speech this morning to sell his massive twin spending bills was full of deceit and lies, wrapped in a cloud of malarkey.

He said his “framework” is “fiscally responsible.” This comes as Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, tweets this very morning that “it’s twice as big , in real dollars, as the New Deal was.” When the national debt already is at a record high of 125% of the annual economy, adding spending that is twice as big as President Franklin Roosevelt’s astonishing expansion of government (done at a time of a Great Depression, not at a time with historically low unemployment) cannot by even a semi-rational definition be called fiscally sound.

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Biden said, “It’s fully paid for.” That’s more flim-flam. The respected, centrist Committee for a Responsible Government released a statement saying, “The framework relies heavily on the massive gimmick of arbitrary sunsets to make the numbers work. … To truly Build Back Better, policymakers need to drop the gimmicks and games.”

He said it will “lower the inflationary pressures.” Since when has at least $3 trillion of new spending ever reduced, rather than exacerbated, inflation?

He said his plan is built on “compromise and consensus.” But it doesn’t have the support of a single Republican, and at least two Democratic senators haven’t signed on , but instead offered mere encomiums to “significant progress,” not to agreement. He said that “somewhere along the way, we stopped investing in our people.” This is utterly divorced from reality. Even before these twin plans, and even before spending $5.7 trillion in COVID-19 relief, the federal government already was spending far more money in real terms than ever before.

He says he offers an “expanded child tax credit” that is “permanently refundable.” For millions of people, it would be not a credit but a new entitlement subsidy divorced from work or responsibility…. [The full column is at this link.]

 

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