The Biden/Harris administration is ignoring established budget tradition in their determination to spend yet more money.
Since the Reagan era, each federal budget has included a list of achievable spending cuts. The final Obama/Biden budget boasted of their averaging 140 cuts, saving $22 billion, yearly. Then-VP Biden headed up these cost cutting efforts as he did the spending reductions in the 2011 Budget Control Act.
Obama praised Biden‘s leadership in the Campaign to Cut Waste, calling him “the right man to lead it because nobody messes with Sheriff Joe.”
So Biden was justified in campaigning on his record of cost-cutting, which he did (although overall spending never fell during his tenure). But, as we have seen on almost every front, the rhetoric of candidate Biden meant nothing.
His initial budget was the first in 40 years to not include a section on savings. Instead, he withdrew President Trump’s final 73 rescissions, which would have saved taxpayers $24.4 billion, including several, such as the Commission on Fine Arts and the Presidio Trust, that had been included in earlier Obama/Biden reductions. His address to Congress in April in lieu of the SOTU contained no mention of waste reduction, nor has any other communication so far.
The contrast is striking. In 2011, President Obama proposed a $4 trillion deficit reduction over 12 years. We now know he fell far short of the mark, yet 10 years later, President Biden proposed a $14.5 trillion increase in deficits over 10 years. Success seems quite probable this time.
What’s going on here? Biden’s inference that there is no waste available in federal spending is laughable. State and local governments are awash in newfound largess. Unemployed beneficiaries have received so much compensation that millions have understandably quit their jobs.
Americans in no financial stress, nursing home residents and dead people by the millions have received COVID stimulus checks. Meanwhile, the Department of Education, an inconsequential agency that has overseen the decline of American education at all levels despite a massive funding surge, was given a $67 billion boost.
The tsunami of spending is relentless. Our national debt has now reached $28 trillion, including a 30 percent increase from spending on the Covid shutdowns alone. Federal spending this fiscal year is about $8 trillion, fully half of which will be put on the tab.
Biden’s next budget is $6 trillion, plus $6 trillion or so of additional spending on anticipated campaign promises. If Biden’s budget plan is adopted, the projected national debt would be $44,800,000,000 by 2031. Moreover, the current value of obligations to finance legal entitlement programs is $132 trillion more.
We are clearly on an unsustainable course. Easy money and goosing the economy with government spending can only take us so far. Eventually, our luck will run out when interest rates return to normal, creditors run out of confidence, inflation and lack of productivity gains take their toll or all of the above.
Technology may help some to delay the deterioration of our standard of living. But our descendants will be far worse off and America will be permanently damaged from our foolish selfishness.
Yet there is a preternatural calmness in Washington circles over the consequences of pushing massive debt out to future generations. When the ruling Left discusses their multi-trillion dollar spending proposals, they typically don’t bother to address the revenue problem. The fact that they are politically popular (and Biden’s “free” spending proposals are) is rationale enough in Dem World.
The spenders act as if spending itself is a social good. Deeply in debt, they spend for unnecessary frills like taxpayer-supplied benefits for illegal immigrants and middle class social programs.
They profess to believe that money will always be available so long as government can figuratively print more, but that is patently ludicrous. More likely, they just don’t care.
These are people who fervently believe in the power of Big Government to make life better, the overwhelming evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. The more money that is spent on anything, the larger their constituent base grows. As in the border crisis, the chance to maintain power drives policy.
Literally nothing else matters.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
They’re still trying to scare us. Apparently, some people in our country just don’t like seeing businesses reopen, people unmasked, and a return to normalcy. So, as the threat to COVID largely dwindles, it should come as no surprise that the media is now pushing a new threat: the Delta variant.
It will be interesting to see how state and local governments across the country respond to this so-called “latest threat.” As you’ll recall, it didn’t go so well the first time around with most seizing the opportunity to abuse emergency powers, even here in Arizona. And although Arizona’s COVID response puts it ahead of most other states in the country, there’s still work to be done.
Thankfully, our state lawmakers haven’t ignored the problem. And with various provisions in a series of Budget Reconciliation Bills, they have taken important steps to protect Arizona from more COVID mandates and government overreach.
Universities have played a consequential role in the fight against the coronavirus that has swept the globe—their research tries to prevent the disease or mitigate its effects, their classrooms and labs train the future physicians and others trying to save lives, and their hospitals and clinics try to heal those with not only this sickness but all sorts of other serious aliments afflicting humankind. About 100 institutions with med schools and hospitals are particularly critical.
With all this is mind, I recently chatted with Dr. Harold Paz, Executive Vice President and Chancellor for Health Affairs at Ohio State (OSU), and CEO of its Wexner Medical Center. Dr. Paz has run university medical centers at Rutgers and Penn State as well, and was the chief health executive at Aetna for several years. He also has had close professional associations with several private schools, such as Rochester, Johns Hopkins and Yale. He is an articulate, bright individual.
The health care component at massive universities like Ohio State, as measured by spending, now sometimes exceed 50%—it is around $4.5 billion a year ($500,000 an hour) at OSU, bigger than all other parts of that huge school combined—an institution with 60,000 or so students in Columbus alone. Dr. Paz spends 20 times as much as the athletic director overseeing OSU’s superstar status athletic programs.
The next Republican Prescott Mayor will be chosen in the August 3, 2021 primary. The two candidates are Phil Goode and the incumbent, Greg Mengarelli. Early voting begins on July 7th.
When people ask me why Prescott is so special and what does it mean to me, I always respond that Prescott is traditional America with the values and the culture that Americans have always loved and sought.
Many of us are fed up with the political class in Washington, D.C. and throughout state and local governments that holds its citizens in low regard and favors itself rather than the citizens it supposedly represents. Such a culture appears to be raising its head locally in this election.
Let’s look at the two candidates seeking victory on August 3rd. Which of these two candidates can best represent American values and protect Prescott culture, its small town feel, and critically, its future, with governance of water policy and development that is competent, honest, transparent and without even the perception of self-interest?
The key question is who will best “serve” the citizens of Prescott as Mayor? A generic description of the individual who will best “serve” the citizens of Prescott is the candidate who has a history of service for fellow citizens and community organizations and proven leadership roles in the real world not conflated with personal gain and profit.
A recent GoBankingRates survey found that over 50% of Americans want student-loan forgiveness for everyone with any student-loan debt. Considering Democratic lawmakers are hoping President Joe Biden will keep his promise to cancel $50,000 in student debt per person, this data could certainly be used for leverage. But while the number of Americans who now want to see all higher ed-related debt simply erased from the books is growing, it doesn’t mean that we should follow along.
Pandemic and lockdown-related unemployment coupled with a slow economic growth following the low reopening of most states have, indeed, made it difficult for countless Americans to pay off their debt. It is thus natural to see U.S. residents wanting to help those in difficult situations. However, blanket loan forgiveness isn’t a response to hardship. It isn’t even a response to the broken American higher education system. Instead, loan forgiveness will only remove our attention from the errors of subsidized higher education.
Despite politicians’ best efforts, there’s simply no bottomless pit of money anywhere. Taxpayers, and even the Federal Reserve, will eventually run dry.
The Arizona Legislature just approved the Goldwater Institute’s plan to dramatically reduce income taxes and simplify the state’s tax code, making Arizona one of the lowest-tax states in the country. This historic reform will restore Arizona’s competitive advantage as a low-tax state and provide a boost for small business owners still struggling to recover from the COVID pandemic.
This plan collapses Arizona’s pre-Prop. 208 tax rates into a single, low 2.5% rate, and it caps the maximum tax rate at 4.5%. This means that no one’s taxes will increase because of Prop. 208. In fact, everyone’s income taxes will go down as a result of this victory.
Additionally, the Goldwater Institute has challenged the constitutionality of Prop. 208, and we’re now awaiting a decision from the Arizona Supreme Court. Fortunately, this new tax reform measure will mitigate the negative effects of Prop. 208—which otherwise would have decimated our economy—and help ensure the state’s future economic success.
