How Much Money Does This Guy Have?
President Biden will be giving his first speech to both Houses of Congress tonight as we are at the mythical “100 Days in Office” tipping point.
And what a 100 days it’s been.
No one has ever said being President was an easy job. Perfect example: President Obama, at the end of his eight years in office, looked like he aged 50 years. Being the leader of the free World will do that to you.
To his credit, President Biden has done more in the first 100 days than his mentor, Obama, did in eight years. That’s not to say he has been successful, just look at the US/Mexican border and you will see a major failure. However, it has been eventful for sure.
Biden came into office as that moderate Democrat that some Republicans might get behind. He was going to build bridges, literally and figuratively, to bring this country together. He was going to undo all of the bad and most of the good of the previous administration. A lifelong politician saying he is going to do things differently. OK.
Let’s face it, that’s all well and good but Joe Biden is a Democrat through and through and what are Democrats great at? Spending money, lots of it. This is where President Biden separates himself from moderate Democrats in a way that is almost imperceptible. He is in the process of creating a new welfare state under the guise of kick starting the economy due to the pandemic.
My calculator no longer has enough digits to calculate the amount of spending the Administration has put into action or plans too. I do not have the final details about the “American Family Plan” so I am just going off of reporting from CNN and The New York Times but it looks to me that this is another attempt at making people more and more dependent on the US Government.
This new plan spread out over ten years will provide tax credits to families and spend almost a trillion dollars on investments, which standing alone, might have been a noble endeavor but taken with all of the other spending packages out there just seems to be a little too much spending.
Contrary to what you may think, I do have a liberal streak. I do think the government, be it state or federal, has an obligation to help the neediest. A country’s success is not measured at the top, it’s measured at the bottom and we should help those people up to a point. People that do not make an effort to better their own situation will be destined to always stay in that situation. Throwing money at people who have no interest to do better, to some, is wasted money. Yet, they will still need public funding to survive. This has been true since the earliest days of the industrial revolution. I am not sure we will ever be able to solve that nagging problem and I have come to accept it.
The thing that gets me and it really is pretty simple. The massive spending that the Biden administration has put into effect or plans to, is supposed to help the economy and put people back to work, while it seems to me, the economy was going to be just fine without trillions of dollars being spent. Restrictions were being lifted. Factories, offices, restaurants were all coming back. Unemployment was receding and wages were rising again. Why throw trillions at an economy that would do just fine without it? Why create a new “New Deal” when it really wasn’t needed?
Unfortunately, I think I have an idea as to why. The Administration wants to create something that looks like a socialist society. Maybe not Castro’s brand of socialism but something where Capitalists will pay for the socialists and we end up tethered to the government in ways the founding fathers never intended.
While a lot of smart people have been chewing on this for months there are two things I think are important here. One, all of these plans have one thing in common, taxes will be increased and we all know the results of higher taxes. Taxes on the ultra rich will not close any gap in the budget and they know that so their next point of taxation will be that level where most business owners sit, upper middle class. The taxing of the upper middle class will be a disaster longer term because it will disincentivize business success. With the inclusion of increased estate taxes, why would anyone want to build a successful family business or any type of successful business for that matter? Why would you create something when the fruits of your labor will end up being used to pay for something that looks and smells like a socialist agenda? The second part of this is the long term affect. With higher taxes, investments will fall. Being able to create means being able to get funding. The funding will flow through the government and that will never work in this country. People will see no incentive to build or create so innovation in this country falls and we become a large player with very little clout. We end up bringing nothing to the table because one of the advantages we always held was our ability to finance and create new technologies. We will lose that edge because the government has created an environment of just surviving instead of thriving.