“We can’t afford it.” Nearly every person in America has heard that line uttered by someone in their family during their lifetime. It succinctly recognizes that the benefit resulting from some item or service is outweighed by the benefits of other items, under a finite money supply. That new computer monitor might be nice, but food, heat, clothes or even saving toward a new car come first.
Propublica, in conjunction with the Washington Post, produced an article in the beginning of the year which outlined the simultaneous growth and spending over the Trump years. To do so, they needed a comparison, so they included the spending over the years of Obama:
Source: U.S. Treasury (Lena V. Groeger/ProPublica)
This graph demonstrates the sheer magnitude of spending under Trump. The problem is that it’s deceptive because it normalizes the insane policy of Obama. For comparison, George W. Bush came into office with $5.67 Trillion in debt, and George H.W. Bush with $4.06T.
One of the things I praised about Biden was that he wasn’t going to waste money getting rid of Space Force. Yes, the creation of the group was a national humiliation, a gaudy announcement to the world that we will spend billions of dollars on style without substance, but that does not excuse spending further billions of dollars on yet another reorganization to get rid of it.
Instead, he’s pushing “infrastructure and jobs”. It’s going to have a $2 Trillion price tag, supposedly, and it will be paid by the increase in taxes.
The obvious problem is that those taxes are already needed elsewhere due to the insane spending of Trump and Obama and the actual necessary spending on national defense seen by international terrorist attacks and COVID-19.
Those issues were direct and omnipresent threats to the continued survival of Americans. They needed to be addressed, and they were. Those are the types of things that people and nations save money and develop credit ratings so they can address when they arise. And we still haven’t done a very good job with them. While there has been much complaint about our border situation being a dire threat to national security due to terrorism weaknesses, we saw actual threats successfully devastate our country via cyberattacks from other nations – something which theoretically was handled as part of the defense package which comprised much of George W. Bush’s spending outlay.
We still haven’t paid for that spending under W., and we certainly haven’t paid for the COVID-19 response. Instead we’re looking at another vanity project, just like Trump’s wall. Unlike the wall, infrastructure and jobs plans will have some usefulness for the average American, but their benefit will generally be greatly outweighed by the cost.
I’ve heard it said that the value of the plans is sociopolitical; that their enactment will provide proof of American strength on an international front after years of weakness, our contemporary moon shot. That proof has already been provided. It happened with COVID-19, where American companies, powered not by the government but by the free market, managed to produce more successful vaccines in a shorter time than the rest of the world combined.
We’ve spent our money and we’ve displayed the superiority of a free market system. We are expected to be providing broad-spectrum vaccines as a result – vaccines which may not reduce and eventually eliminate just COVID-19 but dozens of other plagues.
More, I doubt Vladimir Putin or the Chinese are worried about us expanding broadband access while they continue to successfully use our internet dependence against us to launch cyberattacks. If we’re going to show our power, the way to do it is not by increasing our vulnerability to enemy aggression.
Much of it isn’t even necessary. Many of the “crumbling roads and bridges” were addressed by spending under Obama, and the job market is already recovering. It’s a vanity project, like Trump’s wall, but with an eye toward buying votes instead of reaping contractor kickbacks.
The key issue here is the debt. Were Biden to only spend the money on infrastructure and jobs, the outlay from new taxes would indeed cover it. But he’s also effectively spending by boosting the stock market with cheap money policy, the same way that Obama and Trump did – and I haven’t yet heard anything about reversing the late Trump-era policy on direct investment in individual companies by the Fed. We’re still dealing with the fallout from a slashed military under Obama and the redirection of military funds to the asinine border wall and Space Force reorg under Trump; China is using that weakness to expand and we haven’t even ramped up operations with South Korea again. We’re continuing many unnecessary tariffs and set to trigger more from Europe. That’s all before we address the regular costs of day-to-day operation of a government that’s among the largest disorganizations the world has ever seen or promised subsistence payouts to many of our citizens.
We’ve seen the stock market jump throughout the past twelve years, but it’s been an ever increasing bubble, because it’s predicated on an illusion. Those numbers represent the faith that the government will continue to directly support them, not the value of the items being produced or the property already controlled by the listed companies. Our country has the appearance of being far wealthier than it is.
I support Biden’s proposed tax increase not because I’m a believer in increased taxes, but because the notion of lowering taxes to increase business transactions – and thus revenue – only works when those transactions are happening. Under a tariff laden market, with paid-off companies feeling little drive to expand their operations, increased taxes are needed to bring in cash. They’re not going to bring in enough to cover the current spending independent of the COVID-19 recovery costs, and it’s foolish or malign to pretend they will.
The $2.5 Trillion from the tax increase has already been spent, ten times over. Spending it yet again is nothing short of irresponsible, and is leading our country toward insolvency.
(An addendum: the $2.5 Trillion number is operating under the assumption that the tax proposals actually produce the projected increase… something which will not happen. Over the next 15 years there will be other Presidents, who will modify the tax and spending numbers. It will happen, because it always happens; it’s why many of us complained about Trump’s focus on “permanent” tax cuts to corporations – which would undoubtedly be reversed with the next Democrat President – while promoting “phased out” tax cuts on individuals, despite individual tax rates being more politically charged and difficult for successive Presidents to increase. Even in the smallest way in which the general population might be aided, Trump and his enablers in the Republican party screwed us. But that’s for another time; the lesson here is that long-term projections aren’t valid measurements. Sadly, even that truth is a distraction. If we accept the Pollyanna view that the taxes will reap what is promised, we’re still looking at devastating levels of overspending.)
