Even At Half The Price, Biden’s Plan Is A Self-Destructive, Freedom-Destroying Spending Spree by Thomas McArdle
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/07/biden-to-taxpayers-go-invest-in-yourself/
Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t get more arrogant or dishonest, President Joe Biden on Tuesday, visiting the congressional district of one of the House’s less-extreme Democrats, warned that “autocrats” in the world are scrutinizing America for signs of decline on the geopolitical stage, and we therefore must “invest in ourselves” to prove “that American democracy works.”
Translation: spend trillions with a T establishing a new series of cradle-to-grave entitlements that, like our already-existing entitlements, will in short order become politically impossible ever to repeal.
Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moreover, look straight into the TV camera and tell the American people that these unprecedented, astronomical expenditures will cost zero.
This, not Donald Trump placing the spotlight on all-too-real election fraud, is the true “Big Lie.”
No one using a gift card at the store in the weeks after Christmas is a big enough liar or financial illiterate to claim that the spending spree he’s enjoying costs zero. It costs plenty; the point is he’s not paying for it! But shame and economic ignorance are never obstacles for today’s Democrats in pursuit of power over our lives.
We know that middle-class American taxpayers will be suffering the pain of paying for the “$3.5 trillion” that is actually more like $5 trillion, which Democrats themselves know isn’t infrastructure at all, as they claim it to be.
Why else would the bill include $80 billion for the IRS to expand its powers to Orwellian realms and spy on checking and savings accounts where the balances or transactions exceed $600? Are we to believe that in order to steal from the rich and give to Uncle Sam, Robin Hood and his merry band of revenue collectors now need the bank statements of the millions of Americans who can barely pay their monthly bills – so many of whom pathetically voted for Democrats, naively thinking it was in their interest?
The left’s overreach is so glaring that this all may backfire. After all, the two lone Democrats in the Senate with a modicum of fiscal sanity, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom know that supporting the bill as presently constituted spells their own political suicide, have been terrorized by leftist activists – in kayaks on the Potomac River in Manchin’s case, and in a public ladies room stall and a commercial airplane in the case of Sinema.
The exhortations of Rep. Maxine Waters of South Central Los Angeles a while back to harass political opponents obviously did not fall on deaf ears.
Then again, Manchin now indicates he could accept $2.2 trillion. If he and Sinema settle for something in between that lesser but still monstrous number and the staggering amount of spending Biden and Pelosi want, it will still be plenty to fuel new, insatiable entitlement beasts.
And remember, even Trump, in many ways more conservative even than Ronald Reagan, has tended to be reluctant in proposing reforming the entitlement programs that already exist, concluding that it was too politically risky, a position shared by many other Republicans.
So we may be set for a self-destructive, individual freedom-destroying spending spree even if Democrat leaders fail to get all they want.
The worst damage, however, will actually be to U.S. national security.
Biden’s Impotent, Self-Loathing Superpower
Biden is correct that autocrats – from China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – see a consequential moment in history and are eyeing the world’s lone superpower.
But he conveniently forgot to note that his unexpectedly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan produced this moment. Thanks to that, China has, on cue, been flying more military aircraft into Taiwan airspace than ever before, and the Taiwanese government is petrified, fully aware that Biden as commander-in-chief cannot be depended on for any real help.
This president’s domestic and foreign policies form a seamless garment of American abasement. Our secretary of state – named A. Blinken, an irony that exceeds the Dickensian – in March, in the name of diplomacy, swallowed face-to-face verbal abuse from the Chinese; meanwhile, the Biden Justice Department thinks parents concerned with the ideological insanity being taught to their children in public schools are domestic terrorists; Biden blames COVID-19 on the tens of millions of Americans leery about taking vaccines developed less than a year ago, and uses the full powers of the federal government to bully them into submission; he blames his own crisis of an open southern border on the supposed racism of our nation’s heroic border guards, who are largely Hispanic.
Whatever the problem or issue, at home or abroad, for the Biden administration the fault lies with America.
Step back and consider the difference between success and failure for the United States in national security over the decades. For instance, Henry Kissinger, the architect of Richard Nixon’s detente with Moscow, in his 2014 book “World Power,” described how Reagan won the Cold War by rejecting detente.
“Sensing potential Soviet weakness and deeply confident in the superiority of the American system (he had read more deeply in American political philosophy than his domestic critics credited), Reagan blended the two elements – power and legitimacy – that had in the previous decade produced American ambivalence,” according to Kissinger, conceding, at least implicitly, the shortcomings of his own foreign policy under Nixon and Gerald Ford.
“He challenged the Soviet Union to a race in arms and technology that it could not win,” Kissinger added, noting that Reagan’s commitment to missile defense against nuclear attack “is widely credited with convincing the Soviet leadership of the futility of its arms race with the United States.”
Biden – as much an anti-Reagan as he is a doddering, septuagenarian reincarnation of Jimmy Carter – sees no good in the exercise of American power, and in the legitimacy of a geopolitical order led by a United States with the moral confidence to act as the superpower that won the Cold War.
This is hardly a surprise, since Biden’s judgment on foreign policy has been unfailingly wrong for decades, the Cold War being a conspicuous example. While Reagan was presenting his bold, prescient Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, the New York Times was reporting that “Senator Biden argues, Washington’s major problem in Europe is no longer doubt about its commitment to NATO’s defense, but the belief that the Reagan administration ‘is not genuinely committed to stabilizing East-West relations through arms reduction.’”
In fact, Reagan was the first U.S. president who made arms reduction – not just control – a reality.
During Reagan’s second term, with the Soviet Union just several years from the ash heap of history, as Reagan foresaw, Biden believed Reagan’s missile defense would cause, not prevent, nuclear war.
Does anyone believe that President Biden is “deeply confident in the superiority of the American system” or that he has read deeply in American political philosophy?
Today, all the signs are there of a self-flagellating, collapsing giant going through a fatal identity crisis – exactly what someone following Biden’s long career of misjudgment and wrongheadedness would fully expect from a Biden presidency. The impending socialistic spending of trillions of new dollars funded at the expense of the private investment and entrepreneurship that defines America in the eyes of the world will accelerate our incremental collapse as an economic and military superpower.
The U.S. has become a player on the world stage that could not even manage a retreat from its longest conflict, its populace understandably war-weary and unaware of what our mission ever was in Afghanistan. Perhaps hundreds of U.S. citizens, and maybe thousands of Afghan allies possessing green cards entitling them to residency here, remain stranded under Taliban rule, with the White House availing itself of every opportunity to change the subject.
Our southern border is now an international joke, a 1,954-mile-long symbol of American national incompetence.
And what should we do, according to Biden, the enfeebled leader of a party he makes no effort to prevent from hurtling to the far left, a president who repeatedly assured us on Tuesday that “I’m a capitalist”?
America, go invest in yourself.
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