Biden’s moderate public persona channels the political agendas of socialist Bernie Sanders and government-knows-best enthusiast Elizabeth Warren.
Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate who pledged a “return to normalcy.” But what’s become frighteningly clear during his first 100 days in office is that, despite his relatively relaxed and reassuring public persona, Joe Biden is no moderate, and what he is pushing legislatively is the antithesis of normal.
Mr. Biden seeks the biggest and most far-reaching expansion of the federal government in American history.
The dollar figures alone are staggering and defy all historical precedent: some six trillion dollars in new spending and an additional $3 trillion in new taxes, including a near-doubling of the capital gains tax for successful investors.
In short, the American people may have voted for normal and moderate Joe Biden, but what they got instead, policy-wise at least, was socialist Bernie Sanders and government-knows-best enthusiast Elizabeth Warren.
If Mr. Biden simply were proposing to spend a lot more money, that would be bad but reversible. Unfortunately, what he is trying to do is much worse.
The president seeks to legislate a slew of new entitlements that will exert government control over parts of our lives which, heretofore, have been relatively and blissfully free of state manipulation—pre-school education, childcare, and community college attendance, for instance.
As the Wall Street Journal editorial board explains:
The cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life.
The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.
The problem is that entitlements, once established, become ticking financial time bombs that are immune to reform and modernization. Witness Social Security and Medicare, two badly-designed programs which consume an increasing share of the federal budget, and which are now politically sacrosanct and, sadly, untouchable.
“The Biden administration and President Biden have exceeded expectations that progressives had,” exulted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) during a virtual town hall. “I’ll be frank. I think a lot of us expected a lot more conservative administration.”
So, too, did many Biden voters—especially middle class wage earners. They, ultimately, will bear the brunt of Biden’s entitlement burden through fewer jobs, slower economic growth, higher taxes, and less opportunity.
Feature photo credit: Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders: three Democratic peas in a socialist pod, courtesy of Florida Politics.