Vaunce News

🔒
❌ About FreshRSS
There are new available articles, click to refresh the page.
Before yesterdayYour RSS feeds

Back in the USSR?: Biden’s Budget for Gargantuan Government

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

It marked the end of an experiment that lasted almost a century, testing the premise that godless secularization—turning control of people’s lives over to other people to rule them, who decide what others need and how they should live and conduct their lives—is the answer for mankind.

In the free world, the collapse of the Soviet Union was cause for celebration. In the USA, it was widely viewed as a victory of the American way of life—a free nation under God.

But let’s not get confused between things and the names we give them.

Our own country—despite the words in our founding documents about freedom and God—has been on a path adopting the same premises about human reality that led to the collapse of the communist world.

This was evident in President Joe Biden’s message to the nation in his State of the Union address on March 7.

Biden, in so many words, delivered a message that the path for a better, wealthier, fairer America is more government.

Despite the reality that the country is being crushed with staggering debt, the result of runaway government, Biden and his party celebrate this and want even more.

The words find their way into numbers in the budget for the next 10 years that the president has just submitted to Congress.

Federal spending in this budget will stand in fiscal year 2025 at $7.3 trillion. One-quarter of our national economy consumed by the federal government.

This amounts to a 14% increase from where federal spending stood in the last quarter of 2023—$6.4 trillion.

Per the president’s spokesperson in the White House, this budget “invests in all of America to make sure everyone has a fair shot.”

“We leave no one behind.”

Translation: Government will accumulate more power and decide what is fair and achieve its aims with more government, paid for with other people’s money.

The beautiful language of leaving “no one behind” means government expansion into every area of our lives, including subsidized child care for families earning $200,000 and below.

The bill for the massive new spending, per the president’s budget, will be paid for with a total of $4.9 trillion in tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations.

I say “supposedly paid for” because expansion of government under the premises of raising taxes on the most successful sectors of our economy never works.

Renowned economist Arthur Laffer and Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore just published data showing that when President Donald Trump cut the highest individual tax rate and cut the corporate tax rate in 2017, the percentage of overall taxes paid by the wealthiest 1% of the population increased. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Before the Trump tax cuts, the top 1% paid “a little more than 40% of the income taxes collected,” per Laffer and Moore. After the tax cuts, that percentage increased to almost 46%.

This was not something new. Laffer and Moore show data going back to 1980 showing general correlation of lower top tax rates with a larger percentage of overall taxes paid by the top 1%.

Freedom means unleashing productivity and creativity. Absence of freedom means punishing both and therefore getting less of both.

It’s why the Soviet Union collapsed. Godless secularism doesn’t work.

The latest edition of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education’s “The State of Black Progress” shows the uniform failure of expansion of government into health care, education, housing, and retirement, all in the name of “fairness” and no one being “left behind.”

The truth really is, it’s more than this. It’s about politicians who love power buying it with gifts given with other people’s money. Harsh to say, but this is reality.

Only 19% of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, per Gallup.

Most Americans feel something is wrong. We need leadership to take us back to freedom and God.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The post Back in the USSR?: Biden’s Budget for Gargantuan Government appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Biden’s DOA Budget

(John Hinderaker)

Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a campaign document.

But, for what it is worth, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about it:

President Biden proposed Monday a $7.3 trillion budget for the next fiscal year that would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations, trim the deficit and lower the costs of prescription drugs, child care and housing.

Other than spending $7.3 trillion and raising taxes, it wouldn’t do any of those things. For purposes of comparison, federal spending in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, was $1.79 trillion. So Biden wants to spend almost exactly four times that much.

The fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and it would raise taxes by a net total of $4.9 trillion, or more than 7% above what the U.S. would collect without any policy changes.

Those hypothetical deficit cuts depend on economic forecasts in the out-years that won’t come true. The only meaningful fact is that Biden wants to raise taxes by nearly $5 trillion.

Biden’s purported budget is largely an exercise in fantasy:

The budget leaves some blank spaces. It lists principles for shoring up Social Security, without specifying a plan. It calls for paying for extensions of tax cuts for most households after 2025 but doesn’t detail how that would be paid for. And it calls for restoring the expanded child tax credit, but only temporarily, lumping that into the broader 2025 tax debate.

Biden’s budget proposes absurd taxes on corporations and “the rich”:

The budget repeats many past Biden tax-increase proposals, including higher tax rates on corporations and high-income individuals along with minimum taxes on the wealthiest Americans’ unrealized capital gains.

Which is insane. If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.

Biden rolled out several new tax increases last week, such as raising his new corporate alternative-minimum-tax rate to 21% from 15% and denying deductions when corporations pay any workers, not just top executives, more than $1 million.

The net effect of Biden’s proposals would be to give the United States one of the heaviest tax burdens in our history, equaled only once since World War II.

Is that because people are dying to give the federal government more money to waste? No, it is because many people are too naive to understand that, as has been said a million times, corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them. Those taxes are actually paid mostly by customers (i.e., all of us) and secondarily by employees (i.e., most of us). But Biden’s budget is not about economics or, for that matter, mathematics, as the numbers will never add up. Rather, it is about politics:

Biden’s advisers are betting that a focus on lowering costs for families will help push the president to re-election.

Needless to say, Biden’s budget, if actually enacted, would raise costs for families, not lower them. Fortunately, there is zero chance of that happening.

China Slightly Lowers 2024 GDP Growth Target from 2023 as Economy Languishes

China set an official 2024 target for GDP growth of around five percent in a report from Premier Li Qiang to the National People's Congress.

Illegal Immigration, Ukraine, and the Economy

 

By U.S. Customs and Border Protection – CBP Processing Unaccompanied Children, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51178808

 

Mainstream media and the administration are pushing a narrative that funding for the Ukraine War and illegal immigration is helping the economy, both of which are complete nonsense. In fact, a Washington Post story on this topic begins by saying that “the economy is roaring,” and then goes on to explain how this amazing economy is driven by immigrants who are responsible for job creation.

Although they have twisted the interpretation of the economic data to make it appear that the economy is doing well, the average American is worse off than they were five years ago. Biden claims job creation, but the number of full-time jobs has been in steady decline. The number of part-time jobs is growing, and this is because of an influx of millions of people for whom minimum wage and no benefits are better than what they left behind. Twitter is full of ironic posts by conservatives saying, “Biden created X number of jobs, and I have three of them.” The number of Americans working two or more jobs has increased by 28% under Biden.

Wages have increased only modestly, while prices are up a cumulative 21 percent. Biden claims inflation is falling, but what he actually means is that prices are rising more slowly than they were a year ago. That is not much of a help if you already cannot afford to make ends meet. Gas is still about 42% higher than before the pandemic, and food is up 25%. The reasons why your dollar is buying less are because of government spending, credit expansion, deficits, debt, and money printing.

The funding for the Ukraine war is a perfect example. While there may be very legitimate national security reasons to defend Ukraine and oppose the expansion of Russia, it is not true that Ukraine funding is growing the US economy. The Wall Street Journal claims that the aid given to Ukraine benefits the US economy because much of it is actually paid to US defense contractors. And while this is true, that money represents government debt. The government is literally borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

Government debt-funded spending helps a few US firms, but debt causes inflation and currency devaluation, which hurt Americans now. It also hurts Americans in the future in the form of taxes needed to repay the debt.

Illusory economic growth stemming from debt-fueled government spending is temporary and unsustainable. The boom must end in a bust, which will be even worse than our current economy. Government debt must be repaid with interest, and interest rates are currently dramatically higher than in 2019. Currently, the Fed discount window interest rate is 5.5%, and the monthly interest rate on US government debt is 3.15 percent.

Another issue with increasing America’s debt to defend another country is the opportunity cost. Buying weapons for Ukraine is not an investment in productive assets. If you take a loan to buy a machine that allows you to earn income in the future, you calculate the income against the debt, and if you have a positive gain, you borrow the money. For example, you take a loan to buy a limousine and then charge people $300 an hour to ride in it. But the money spent on Ukraine will never produce an economic return.

If the same amount of money had been put into education, research and development, or border security, America would see a return on its investment.

Turning our attention to border security takes us back to immigration. The Washington Post recently claimed that “About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024.” All they are really saying is that 50% of the new jobs were taken by immigrants. This is not a benefit to the average American. The Congressional Budget Office claims that the economy will grow by $7 trillion over the next decade, and $1 trillion of this is attributable to immigration.

The $7 trillion figure is just a mathematical function of the average US annual growth times 10 years. And it is based on the highest Biden growth year, a one-time boost to the economy when Biden allowed people to get back to work after Covid. That $7 trillion will most likely take more like 15 years to materialize, assuming the US economy ever gets back to normal.

The additional $1 trillion attributed to immigrants is simply based on the projected increase in the size of the population. So, basically, what the data proves is that immigration makes the population larger, something we all probably knew. And these figures ignore the money spent on welfare, aid to immigrants and illegal immigrants, healthcare paid for by the state, the cost of educating immigrant children, the cost of courts and law enforcement, increased crime and drug use caused by open borders… all of which is funded by government debt which, as we have already covered, hurts the economy in the long term and diverts resources from other more productive activities or citizen services.

 

 

The post Illegal Immigration, Ukraine, and the Economy appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

CBP_Processing_Unaccompanied_Children_(15020196668)

By U.S. Customs and Border Protection - CBP Processing Unaccompanied Children, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51178808
❌