OOPS, I CRAPPED MY PANTS
So far, the defining word of the bungling Biden era is “trillion.”
The Joe Biden who portrayed himself as a moderate, old school, bipartisan deal-maker during the presidential campaign is now a distant memory.
He’s been replaced by the bungling Biden who is dazzling progressives with his willingness to “go big” — in other words, spend jaw-dropping amounts.
Why has bungling Biden embarked on a historic spending splurge with nary a whisper of bipartisan support?
Well,
DEMOCRATS talked themselves into the proposition that there isn’t any such thing as spending too much money.
Besides, spending is what Biden the bungler can actually do — he can pass his stimulus and relief bills under the so-called reconciliation rules in the Senate, requiring only 50 votes rather than the 60 it takes to break a filibuster.
In fiscal year 2019, the federal government, which wasn’t exactly tightening its belt, spent $4.4 trillion.
Bungling Biden is on pace to roughly match that with "his" first two major legislative initiatives — the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, and his new $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal.
The bumbling Biden team gives the sense that it is working backward — starting with a big, eye-popping price tag and then figuring out what initiatives can be thrown in to reach the top-line number.
Public schools already have tens of millions of dollars sitting unspent from prior relief bills, and here comes another $100 billion to "upgrade schools" in the "infrastructure" bill.
The states were lavished with $350 billion in the COVID-19 relief bill, even though many of them didn’t lose revenue during the pandemic. Why weren't those dollars spent on infrastructure?
The new proposal is an infrastructure, drinking-water, broadband, home-retrofitting, manufacturing, long-term-care, electric-car, unionization bill — and a few other things besides.
The question is whether, when all the money is spent, anyone can point to any transformative change in the country attributable to the legislation.
Certainly, the need for infrastructure spending over and beyond what the federal government, states and localities already spend is oversold.
A recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research noted: “Over the past generation, the condition of the interstate highway network improved consistently, its extent increased modestly, and traffic about doubled. Over about the same time period, the condition of bridges remained about the same, the number of bridges increased slowly, and bridge traffic increased modestly.”
Shooting money out of a bazooka is not self-evidently what the state of America’s infrastructure calls for. But when the only tool you have is huge reconciliation spending bills, everything looks like a crisis urgently requiring more profligacy.
The bills are also a substitute for passing significant non-spending policy changes. Unlike FDR, bungling Biden has narrow and tenuous congressional majorities. He’s couldn't get HR1, gun confiscation, or open borders, unless Senate
DEMOCRATS eliminate the filibuster.
What he can do, which FDR and LBJ never could, is reach for the word “trillion” as much as possible.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/04/03/lowry-moneys-no-object-for-spend-happy-biden/