In an effort to make it appear that he is serious about the government’s fiscal condition and is negotiating in good faith, Joe Biden posted to his social-media accounts a chart purporting to show, “I’ve got a plan to continue reducing the deficit — if only they’d listen.” It appears to couple a four-part plan to “cut spending” with a five-part plan to “raise revenue”:
As is frequently true of Democratic messaging on social media, the first thing it tells us is that Biden thinks his supporters are idiots. Even if you take the chart at face value and just do some basic math, Biden appears to be proposing $274 billion in “spending cuts” but $2.6 trillion in tax hikes. That’s not remotely balanced or comparable — it’s $9.48 in tax hikes for every dollar of spending cuts.
But it gets worse from there. Basically all of Biden’s proposed “spending cuts” are just tax hikes barely disguised as spending cuts. You can tell from phrases like “eliminate tax subsidies” and “eliminate . . . loopholes.” Sure, some things done through the tax code are really spending, if you’re giving tax credits to people with no tax liability, but that’s generally not what’s going on here.
Biden has been with the moderates on some issues and at some times in his half-century career in Washington. But he has always been a budget-busting tax-and-spend liberal. Of course, his answer to every problem is more spending and more taxes.
If Biden were honest, he’d just come right out and say that his plan is to raise trillions of dollars of additional taxes, period. But he expects his social-media followers to swallow this instead.