The Biden economic plan is simple: go all-in on deficit spending. The president and his advisers think they can green paper over the structural problems in the U.S. economy. They’re wrong.

President Biden has already spent $1.9 trillion on a COVID-19 relief bill that provides hardly any funding for combating the virus. Now he wants to spend $2.3 trillion (only the first round, mind you) on an infrastructure bill that has a rather elastic understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. This sort of thing drives economists crazy. A global pandemic is a pretty good reason for the federal government to kick in some vaccine funding. Infrastructure decay is a pretty good reason for the federal government to reinvest in bridges, roads, and harbors. So of course both these bills are mostly about unrelated things. If you’re looking for truth in advertising, you won’t find it in politics.