Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Socialist Dream Is Tax-and-Spend Nightmare
Deroy Murdock /
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans a vote soon to push Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $3.5 trillion socialist dream budget one step closer to law.
The news gets worse from there. Every other detail about this onerous legislation merits scorn, revulsion, and rejection.
The so-called Build Back Better budget resolution boasts a $3.5 trillion price tag. Taxpayers should be so lucky.
That figure assumes that several key initiatives, including the child tax credit, will expire in three to five years. Since government programs are virtually immortal, this is not wishful thinking. It’s pure fantasy.
Reasonably assuming that these programs grind on for 10 years swells the budget’s true price to $5.5 trillion. Add the Senate’s $1 trillion “infrastructure” bill, which most House Democrats hope to append, and Sanders’ budget hits $6.5 trillion.
Next, blend in $400 billion for interest payments on the exploding national debt. That pushes the “$3.5 trillion” package’s real cost to $6.9 trillion—nearly double its advertised price.
“Bernie’s budget is all about inserting the federal government into the daily lives of all Americans and spending as much money as possible while doing so,” warned Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.
Democrats plan to underwrite this bachelor-party-like extravaganza by borrowing from the Chinese Communist Party and by hiking levies on America’s beleaguered taxpayers. Sanders’ budget constitutes the biggest tax increase since 1968—before man walked on the moon.
The Club for Growth Foundation counts $3.6 trillion in new taxes in this measure. Among them:
- Higher revenues from growing the size and reach of the IRS: $266 billion.
- A boost in long-term, combined capital gains taxes from 29% to 48.4%: $322 billion. (If the bill is enacted, investors seeking lower capital-gains taxes could find them in communist China.)
- New IRS spying and subsequent taxes on transactions in bank accounts with balances of $600 or more: $463 billion.
- A new global minimum tax on U.S. companies operating overseas: $534 billion.
- A more-than-25% hike in the corporate tax, from 21% to 26.5%: $858 billion.
Add state levies on such enterprises, and U.S. companies would strain beneath the developed world’s highest tax burden. That’s dreadful for American businesses, jobs, and growth, and a boon to this country’s economic rivals.
Beyond spending and taxes, the Sanders budget would bludgeon the Land of the Free into a socialist “workers’ paradise.”
Among its far left social-engineering schemes:
- An annual methane-emissions tax would cost dairy farmers an extra $6,504 per cow.
- Tax credits for university “environmental justice programs”: $1 billion.
- A $1,500 tax credit on electric bicycles that cost up to $8,000: $7.4 billion.
- A $1,200 tax credit for “green” doors, windows, and skylights: $15 billion.
- Individuals with incomes up to $200,000 could collect $82,000 in federal housing down-payment subsidies.
- “Free” college: $50 billion
- “The Democrat bill also shovels $3.5 billion of your money so D.C. bureaucrats can create something called the ‘Civilian Climate Corps’—a make-work program for young climate activists,” Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist said. “Perhaps they’ll knock on your door with a clipboard and tell you to put on a sweater instead of heating your home adequately.”
These taxpayer-funded eco-busybodies also would be unionized. And, of course, their union dutifully would kick back a chunk of their members’ mandatory dues into the Democratic Party’s campaign coffers.
“In the face of mounting inflation and economic instability, a rational Congress would enact pro-growth tax and spending reforms that pave the way to a smoother recovery,” Andrew Moylan, the National Taxpayers Union’s executive director said, adding, “Instead, current leaders are marching full speed ahead with the most sweeping expansion in the size and scope of government in decades. It’s like throwing a drowning child an anvil instead of a life preserver.”
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