Political

As families across the nation are pinching pennies to pay for gas and groceries, the White House is finding more ways to spend our taxpayer dollars. Every year, the President releases a proposed federal budget. Congress has no obligation to pass these policies, but it gives us an idea of what the Biden administration will be pushing in Congress and through various agencies. President Biden released his budget last week, and it was bad enough for Republicans to declare the $6.9 trillion proposal “dead on arrival.”

According to Biden, this proposal will cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next ten years. To achieve this, he would increase taxes on households making over $400,000 and increase the capital gains tax for high-income earners to over fifty percent. Currently, the Trump tax cuts are in place but are set to expire in 2025. Biden has no plans to extend those cuts and hopes to bank the increase. Although he promises to keep middle-class earners from bearing the burden of a tax increase, he does not detail any plan to do so.  

The most mind-boggling part of his budget is the amount of unnecessary spending. While Biden is touting small deficit cuts, he would like to spend trillions more on his political agenda. Here is a list of some of the most egregious line items:

• Increases tax rates on a million small businesses while eliminating the small business deduction.
• Includes $2 billion for firearm industry regulation.
• Cuts $600 million from Homeland Security even though our nation is suffering from a crisis at the border.
• Increases funding to the Title X Family Planning program from $256 million to $512 million which serves to line the pockets of Planned Parenthood.
• Requests $3 billion “to advance gender equality and equity” across agencies.
• Proposes $100 million to the Department of Education “to promote racial and socioeconomic diversity in their schools.”

Keep in mind, when the President uses broad terms like “gender equality and equity” and “racial and socioeconomic diversity,” the agencies can create new rules and guidance however they wish. Using this vague language keeps Americans in the dark about what will actually emerge. The devil is in the details.

The largest section of the budget is a huge push toward Biden’s climate agenda. He requests $5 billion to address the “climate crisis,” $15 million toward clean energy goals, and $3 billion to quadruple international climate finance. Then, he wants to give $20 million to the Department of Labor to create a Civilian Climate Corps so that his initiatives can be implemented through volunteer work.

This budget is so bad that even the Washington Post’s Editorial Board criticized it in a surprising article. Americans across the political spectrum are taking notice of our $31 trillion debt and feeling the strain on our personal finances. The Washington Post gave this grim warning if nothing is done:

This willful blindness to reality on the part of policymakers has allowed the national debt to rise to more than $31 trillion. The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come…

If our elected officials are serious about decreasing the nation’s debt, they must cut spending, especially on social issues that only serve to further the leftist’s political agenda. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) said it best when he commented on Biden’s budget:  

The only way I know how to improve the president’s budget is with a shredder.