| Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #256 04/02/2021, 04/03/2021, 04/04/2021 |
| 1) Biden’s Big Government Juggernaut Rolls on Doesn’t it sometimes seem like we are the undermanned and outgunned defenseless Poles circa September 1939 facing the German Blitzkrieg as the tanks roll over the border?  The Hill newspaper’s headline yesterday was shockingly honest:  The Hill notes: “The White House is pushing an infrastructure bill that could reshape the discussion around capitalism as it seems to reestablish the federal government as a primary driver of how the economy should grow and function.” This New York Times headline was equally troubling: “Biden Tax Plan Challenges GOP Formula for Economic Growth”  The story notes: “President Biden’s ambitious plan to increase corporate taxes does more than just reverse much of the overhaul pushed through by his predecessor. It also offers a profoundly different vision of how to make the United States more competitive and how to foot the bill. When President Donald J. Trump and a Republican Congress rewrote the tax code in 2017, most of the benefits went to the wealthiest Americans, with lower rates on businesses and on profits from investments. The guiding principle, proponents argued, was that cutting taxes on corporations and investors would encourage businesses to expand, creating more jobs and generating more wealth for everyone. By contrast, the animating idea behind the tax plan put forward by the Biden administration on Wednesday is that the best way to increase America’s competitiveness and foster economic growth is to raise corporate taxes to finance huge [government] investments in transportation, broadband, utilities and more.” This isn’t a new 21st century economic philosophy. It is old-school tax and spend economics of the 1960s and 1970s all dressed up in fancy rhetoric. That episode of our history started with the LBJ Great Society and ended with the collapse of the economy and stock market at the end of the 1970s under Jimmy Carter. We thought this calamitous welfare statism was forever buried in the ashbin of history. The low-tax, limited-government era started under Reagan and Thatcher and which prevailed from 1980 – 2006 was one of world-wide prosperity with the largest decline in global poverty in history. The Times forgot to mention that part. |
| 2) To Infinity and Beyond How high are the Democrats willing to go on spending? The Dems now say that the latest drive for “infrastructure” could be divided into two separate $2 trillion bills – one for bricks and mortar and another for “social infrastructure,” such as income transfer programs, Medicaid, and child care. The chart below shows the staircase to fiscal Armageddon. As we write Alexandria-Occasia Cortez and others in Congress are grousing “we need $10 trillion for the green energy transformation.”  |
Subscribe to receive our full hotline