The Democrats' Spending Bills Show They've Completely Lost Their Minds
The Democrats are ecstatic: They’re implementing their budget. A $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill has just been passed in the Senate, and another $3.5 trillion bill, dubbed a “reconciliation” bill with a special set of budgetary rules, may not need any Republican support at all.
Nevertheless, many sensible Americans should be watching now with horrified fascination as Democratic leaders prepare to indulge in gross unabashed economic imprudence.
For this isn’t a budget: It’s an out-of-control spendathon. Where’s the money coming from?
It’s coming largely from ordinary responsible Americans, moms and dads and grandparents who carefully have to manage real budgets and who struggle honestly and mightily to balance practical household income and expenses.
The Democrats in power have virtually confiscated the credit cards of all solvent Americans and are set to rack up enormous debts on every one of them.
American children for generations to come will be paying off the irresponsible wastefulness and economic spoliation devised in the Democrats’ 2021 so-called budget.
The Founders Would Have Prudently Rejected Any 2,702-Page Bill
What has the U.S. come to? The Founders of this great nation would be horrified at the intellectual sloppiness and crafty dissimulation of both gigantic and over-stuffed bills being presented this week.
All members of Congress, before they go any further on these bills, should be made to read the 202 pages of the Acts of the First Congress of the United States.
The first Congress in those first three sessions, from June 1, 1789, to March 3, 1791, passed intelligently debated bills and resolutions that altogether were set out succinctly in a mere 202 pages.
That’s right. In just 202 pages, the huge task of establishing a whole new government for a brand new country was accomplished prudently, one small piece at a time, each with clarity, competence and economy.
Regrettably, the Senate has just passed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that runs to 2,702 pages.
Certainly, it is crammed with all sorts of extraneous items that are not what most Americans would recognize as infrastructure. It is an immoderately wasteful stew in which the good ingredients of genuine infrastructure like improving roads and bridges have been poisoned with incongruities relating to expanding big government.
As Sen. John Kennedy discerned, “Only 23 percent of the bill is real infrastructure. The rest is Green New Deal and welfare.”
Indeed, we must all know by now that there is something radically wrong with a Democrat-run Congress that needs 2,702 pages to elaborate what should have been an honest, clear and straightforward infrastructure bill.
Democrats Illustrate the Grossness of Greed
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the infrastructure bill would add about $256 billion to the deficit over 10 years.
According to a July report by the CBO, the federal budget deficit will hit $3 trillion this year. The Democrats’ “budget” will add that to a national debt of about $28 trillion.
The Democrats’ extravagance must be reined in. Still reeling from the legitimately expensive exigencies of COVID, the U.S. is in no position to borrow and misspend $3.5 trillion on a clumsily concocted “anti-poverty and climate” bill.
Ostensibly, it is all being done for the good of the poor and to save the world from possible climate change.
But the truth is, as with all communist or socialist experiments, it will be the poor who are eventually hurt the most. Our earth too will be worse off as a vibrant U.S. economy implodes, fuel and food prices skyrocket and even modest climate mitigation programs become totally unaffordable.
The Democrats boast blithely that they will “build back better,” but there’s no indication of that in these two massive, messy bills.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, playing her usual brand of smarmy politics, has said she won’t bring up the infrastructure bill until the Senate also passes the second bill in tandem.
Destructively Rapid and Radical Change
It’s time to be sensible. We all must know by now that both bills are bloated. It’s the kind of bloating that provides a pretense of constitutional cover for summarily forcing the most rapid and radical social and economic changes on the American people.
The real scandal is that these changes are being wrought in the name of reckless and revolutionary ideologies. They were not proposed, spelled out and voted for in the last election.
The Democrats, in their rush to destroy what they have vilified as the incorrigibly “racist” and “unjust” United States of America, are setting up in these gross new bills a weird new country the Founders would not recognize. These bills set the Democrats up to destroy the U.S.A., ostensibly with the “good” intention to “build back better.”
But when we look closely at the virtue signals in these bills, we can perceive that the real intention is to build a foreign country on the ideological lines of Marxism and wokism and to install a socialist economy along the very fault lines of Venezuela’s demise.
Inflation, open borders and reckless social spending all harm the very heart-blood of any nation. The sturdy independence of patriotic Americans is being surreptitiously undermined as more and more Americans are to be manipulated into deeper dependency on government handouts.
Democrats’ big government is devising a Marxist-style redistribution of the nation’s wealth with a Soviet-style contempt for the moral integrity, principles and hard work of all the good Americans who over those first two centuries built and maintained that good fortune.
Democrats’ ‘Build Back Better’ Boast Destined for Failure
Paradoxically, the Democrats’ trumpeted build-back will not be “better” at all.
Instead of a new and better United States of America, we will wake up to a new and messed-up disturbingly foreign country that the Founders and all true Americans since would not recognize.
The deep fault in the Democrats’ build-back is that it lacks prudence. There can be no social justice without social prudence. Aquinas warned, “Moral virtue cannot be without prudence because it is a habit of choosing, i.e., making us choose well.”
These two gargantuan conglomerate bills on the strut are stuffed with bad choices.
The Democrats are in a hurry. Like greedy children at a birthday party, they are grabbing for everything, rushing to gobble it all down. Their eyes are bigger than their stomachs.
But as the Founders understood, good things need to be chewed over carefully and digested slowly.
Good things need to be debated, examined and tested before they are passed.
Good things come in small packages.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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