If you thought Joe Biden hated walls, you might be extrapolating from when he said, “There will not be another foot of [Donald Trump’s] wall constructed in my administration.” But perhaps you didn’t listen to Janet Yellen, the new treasury secretary, talking to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on April 5 and proposing to build a tax wall around America?
Her boss in the Oval Office wants a global minimum tax rate for businesses, which would require developed nations to agree to make themselves less attractive to investment. Biden wants to make sure no American business can escape his punitive taxes, so he’s asking foreign governments not to offer better rates, which his administration refers to as a “race to the bottom.”
When corporations collude in this way, they’re breaking antitrust law and can expect Department of Justice prosecutors to come knocking. Biden, however, is helping us “build back better.” Or, as Yellen put it, making sure Washington has “sufficient revenues to invest in essential public services …” (Note the word “invest,” which is the favored euphemism for “spend.”)
Biden needs his international antitrust arrangement so he can finance bloated “infrastructure” spending, the first tranche of which will cost $2.3 trillion. The second tranche, some $2 trillion, is yet to be unveiled. And both come on top of his unnecessary $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” splurge. Six trillion dollars doesn’t grow on trees, so he wants to lock taxpayers in to pay it.
That’s the difference between right-wing walls and left-wing walls. Trump’s border wall was built to protect an attractive country from people who want to move in illegally. Left-wing walls don’t keep people out but lock them in. They are the option of governments that make their own country so unattractive that sensible people want to escape. The Berlin Wall wasn’t there because Warsaw Pact nations had to stanch a surge of rich westerners clamoring to live behind the Iron Curtain. It was there to stop immiserated easterners from escaping.
Right-wing walls are defenses. Left-wing walls are prisons.
It tells you a lot about Biden’s dire policies that, to give them a chance of working, he has to build a tax prison. Presumably, he won’t hire out-of-work East German guards to shoot corporate executives attempting to flee. So the arrangement won’t be that no one gets out alive; it’ll be that no one gets out without losing his shirt.
Tiresomely often in political argument, a debater looks aghast and says, “This isn’t who we are.” Ironically, this is said only because it is who we’ve become. But there is something distinctly un-American — yes, yes, I know the antecedents of the phrase — about stifling competition, which is central to Biden’s plans.
Some two dozen states are suing him over his attempts to stop individual states cutting taxes. A clause to that effect is in his $1.9 trillion blowout and is a direct attack on the way America was designed to function by its founders. As constitutional scholar Michael Greve has amply shown, the United States is built for competitive federalism. The nation is structured to allow states to compete against each other to be more attractive places to live and work.
But Biden and the Left hate competition, both because it’s a manifestation of freedom and because people vote with their feet. At home and abroad, Biden is trying to kill competition and lock individuals and businesses into higher taxes. The message is — abandon hope while Democrats run the government.
This is where we are. With delusions that he’s the second coming of FDR, Biden is pressing the biggest spending agenda in history to rescue us from emergencies that are melting away and to impose solutions to problems that don’t exist. He’s planning to raise trillions of dollars to pay for it by hiking taxes from which no state will be allowed to shield its people, and no corporation will be able to flee by moving to fiscally sunnier climes.
The Supreme Court may stop Biden from putting states in a fiscal straitjacket, and other countries may not be bamboozled into helping him lock up businesses by making themselves just as unattractive as our president is making America.
But beyond those practical questions, there’s the perhaps bigger matter of what Biden’s tax prison says about the country he wishes to transform. The Left’s agenda is so grasping and desperate, so pusillanimous, defensive, and lacking in confidence, so devoid of free spirit, the question is not, “Is this who we are?” so much as, “Is this really who we want to become?”
If you were to remove all partisan identifiers from that question, so people didn’t relapse into tribal default positions, my bet is that the resounding answer would be, “No!”
