President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act Tuesday, March 23, 2021, at the Arthur James Cancer Hospital and the Richard Solove Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Just how much taxpayer money is Joe Biden going to spend? So far $6 trillion and counting if he gets his way. Karl Rove writes in The Wall Street Journal:
President Biden has 53% approval in the RealClearPolitics average as his 100th day looms. That’s 12 points higher than President Trump at this point in his presidency—but still the second-lowest such rating for any president elected since modern polling of presidential performance began in 1945.
Yet the Biden administration acts as if it has a broad mandate to pursue the most ambitious left-wing agenda in history, involving a massive expansion of the federal government and unsustainable spending increases.
One example is the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, which goes mostly to new programs that have nothing to do with the coronavirus. Similarly, Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal would spend hundreds of billions on roads, bridges, ports, airports, utility grids and broadband—but almost $1.5 trillion on other things.
All this largess requires confiscatory tax increases that would punish savings by raising capital-gains tax rates, devastate small businesses that pass profits through to their owners by taxing income more heavily, and make U.S. businesses less competitive abroad by raising corporate rates well above those of foreign competitors.
There are also bills that would federalize elections, force unionization of America’s workforce, and make the District of Columbia a state. And of course the panel to study packing the Supreme Court and diminishing its power to curtail unconstitutional laws and executive actions.
This column is written before Wednesday’s presidential address, but the White House’s pre-speech “leaks” foreshadow $1.8 trillion in new child and education spending as well as huge additional outlays to shore up ObamaCare. This would bring Mr. Biden’s total in proposed new spending to $6 trillion in his first 100 days.
Then there’s last week’s extravagant climate pledge: By 2030, the U.S. will reduce carbon emissions by more than three times the rate they were cut between 2005 and 2019—while China and India can keep increasing greenhouse gas releases.
No wonder Mr. Biden is winning enthusiastic praise from the Democratic Party’s left, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But his aggressive progressive agenda could erode the president’s support and make his party more vulnerable in the midterms.
The president didn’t campaign in a way that created a mandate for the agenda he’s pursuing. His April 25, 2019, announcement and his Aug. 20, 2020, acceptance show a far different Mr. Biden than the one we’re seeing now.
Writing for Vox, Ezra Klein characterized Mr. Biden’s announcement this way: “Biden isn’t promising a political revolution. He’s not promising to drain the swamp, restructure the Senate, remake capitalism, or usher in socialism. What Biden is promising is a return to normalcy.”
In his debate performance and campaign stops, Mr. Biden didn’t foreshadow huge spending increases, big bump-ups in the debt, crushing tax increases, or transformation of the economy. He sold normalcy—Mr. Biden would be a competent, reassuring, bipartisan moderate waging “a battle for the soul of this nation.”
That was then. Now, he’s radical, aggressive and partisan, pushing the kind of political revolution he rejected during the Democratic primary.
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