It is perhaps only President Joe Biden and his minions who do not know that his Build Back Better agenda is “dead, dead, dead,” which was the way Byron York
referred
to it.
After Sen. Joe Manchin at last managed to persuade his Democratic colleagues that he wasn’t kidding when he said he wouldn’t vote for it, it exhumed itself for a short while as Build Back Smaller. This was a neat way of referring to it being split into smaller parts and passed separately or smuggling its constituent parts into law in other bills to the ostensible purpose of which they were irrelevant.
Lately, it has been suggested, in an echo of “dead, dead, dead,” that Biden’s agenda must now be Build Back Never. That is more like it. But one should not forget the persistence with which Democrats return to their terrible policy prescriptions no matter how many times they are successfully resisted by a democratic system representing voters who do not want them.
That is how we came to the pass we are in now. Old Democratic policies never actually die; they go away, put on a disguise, and keep trying to sneak past ordinary Americans until they succeed.
But if ever a broad policy deserved to die, it is surely Biden’s agenda to spend yet more money that we don’t have until, presumably, the debt market refuses to lend to us. Inflation has jumped to 7.5%, and interest rates are moving higher, too — who wants to lend at a loss? The $30 trillion we already owe as a nation will start costing us more and more to finance while we fail to get anywhere close to living within our means.
The
cover story
of this week’s Washington Examiner magazine, “Biden’s Crushing Money Blizzard,” makes a devastating case against further spending by laying bare the “failure and corruption” of the $1.9 trillion bill Biden signed nearly a year ago in March 2021 — a law named with savage irony, the American Rescue Plan.
It has not rescued the nation, but has, as Brad Polumbo makes clear, lined the pockets of the Democrats’ favorites while, at the same time, actually slowing economic recovery from the lockdown-induced slump begun during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Just like former President Obama’s then-massive stimulus spending — it was a piffling sum measured in hundreds of billions rather than trillions — following the 2009 financial meltdown, much of the money did nothing to meet a trumpeted “emergency” and instead sluiced into the coffers of left-wing organizations across the country.
The American Rescue Plan is an object lesson for America not to throw good money after bad. We keep doing it, and it never works out well. We are paying through the nose for the folly of yesterday, and we must hope that future generations do not have to pay for further financial folly today.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made a compelling case when he
told
David Drucker recently that the main thing Americans would get if they elect a Republican majority this November is “the worst of Joe Biden will be over.”
