Weâve all heard the pitch: President Joe Bidenâs Build Back Better⢠plan wonât cost a cent.
Itâs paid for. Just tax the rich. The money will magically roll in â painlessly, effortlessly. Olâ Lunchpail Joe will hold our nationâs plutocrats by their ankles, give them a good shake, and â by Jove â $3.5 trillion will end up falling out of their pockets.
Thatâs how you get tweets like this one Monday from the presidential Twitter account, evincing someone whoâs not living in reality: âThe fact of the matter is my Build Back Better Agenda costs $0 â and it wonât raise Taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year. Weâre going to pay for it by ensuring those at the top and big corporations pay their fair share.â
Thatâs deluded enough â but passing it off as an actual tax cut is some next-level economic gaslighting.
On Tuesday, Biden was in Howell, Michigan, pitching the Democratsâ $3.5 trillion spending bill as a necessary step for an America thatâs lagging behind the rest of the world in Infrastructure development.
âThis is a blue-collar blueprint for how we restore Americaâs pride,â Biden said, according to the Detroit Free Press.
âOther countries are speeding up and weâre falling behind. We have to speed up the pace.â
Weâve seen Bidenâs youâve-gotta-spend-money-to-make-money pitch since March, when he introduced the first round of exorbitant spending on Infrastructure. Weâve been hearing for weeks that this latest round of spending isnât going to cost a cent and the only people whoâll feel the pinch will be the rich, who need to step up and pay their fair share. Thatâs nothing new.
This line is, however: âMy friends on the other team have no problem giving billionaires and millionaires gigantic tax breaks. This is a tax cut!â
âYou know, what it does is â now and itâs in place, and people in your state are understanding it now â instead of â it provides, it upped the ante for how much you could get for a child under 7,â Biden said. âYou get $3,600 bucks, tax cut, on a yearly basis. And you get $3,000 for a child under 17.â
To the extent thatâs coherent, itâs a lie.
Bidenâs argument here centers on incentives given to families under the proposed plan. This is all wonderful, but Biden continues to insist that the $3.5 trillion heâs about to spend wonât cost a cent.
Therefore, logic dictates that revenue would need to be increased by at least $3.5 trillion by the plan for it to pay for itself. That money isnât going to come from growth, so itâs going to need to come, by and large, from Taxes, both on individuals and corporations â categorically the opposite of a tax cut.
Fine, a liberal might say, but this is just splitting hairs using Bidenâs verbal infelicity. What he meant to say is that, if youâre not a corporation or someone making over $400,000 a year, youâll end up paying less. Youâre getting the breaks and the monocle-wearers are getting soaked. Why complain?
This is wrong, too. An analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation â Â a non-partisan congressional tax scorekeeper â found the vast majority of Americans, almost every income level below the threshold the Biden administration said would be immune, would take a hit.
The JCT also found that 66.3 percent of the burden of a corporate tax hike would end up being shouldered by lower- and middle-class Americans and that 98.4 percent of taxpayers who paid for it would have incomes under $500,000. Thatâs not even counting inflation â that nasty, unseen form of taxation that robs families that canât hedge against it.
Weâve already seen plenty of inflation during the first 10 months of the Biden administration, and weâre going to see a whole lot more of it after trillions upon trillions of dollars are pumped into The economy, diluting the power of the dollar.
That, to Joe Biden, isnât just a net-zero proposition that allows Democrats to pay for a massive spending bill that doesnât so much build Infrastructure as it does funnel money to a long list of Democrat priorities and constituencies. Itâs a tax cut, Biden claims.
Itâs one thing to promise us that we can get all sorts of government largesse that we donât have to pay a dime for. This is how Democrats get elected, after all â by telling us theyâll be providing every American with a free unicorn that eats plastic waste and excretes clean water, and all we have to do is tax billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates to afford it.
Itâs quite another thing, however, to insult our intelligence by insisting weâll be so good at taxing the rich that the government will pay us to take the unicorn, if only we can just give Joe Biden a chance to have his way.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.