He’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday

There’s a new entry in the Progressive-Democrats’ Newspeak dictionary.  According to Congressman Ritchie Torres (D, NY), President Joe Biden’s (D) infrastructure…proposals…

are not expenditures, these are investments[.]

That distortion of the plain language of our honest dictionaries isn’t his whole story, though.

In my view, it’s short-sighted to obsess about the dollar amount because these are not expenditures, these are investments[.]

He’ll gladly pay us Tuesday for an investment in his hamburger today.

Wait—this is Tuesday. Pay up, Congressman. Or better, stop spending money you don’t have. Your credit’s no good.

Wait, wait—Tuesday never comes in the Congressman’s world.

It’s only Money

And it’s not even mine. So, Meh.

Treasury Department officials on Wednesday urged Congress to move quickly to increase the federal borrowing limit this summer, warning that the federal government could run out of cash much sooner than in previous debt-limit episodes.

Joey, crack debt, and the Left don’t care….

Or, channeling another, Biden is saying he’ll gladly owe us Tuesday for a borrowing today.

No.

The Federal government doesn’t need to have its debt ceiling raised. It needs its flood of spending vastly reduced.

Progressive-Democrats’ Newspeak Dictionary

“Infrastructure” entry. Here’s a brief list of what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party claim is infrastructure and what they want to spend $1.25-$1.5 trillions of your tax dollars on.

  • climate action
  • climate justice
  • affordable housing
  • green housing
  • police accountability
  • Supreme Court expansion
  • paid leave
  • child care
  • caregiving

Infrastructure is turtles, all the way down.

Que Bill the Cat.

Here’s the standard, Merriam-Webster online dictionary, definition:

1: the system of public works of a country, state, or region
2: the underlying foundation or basic framework (as of a system or organization)

And the standard, American Heritage online dictionary, definition:

1. An underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system.
2. The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons.

I decline to surrender the dictionary to the extremists of the Left or to their Party.

Infrastructure Biden-Style

That’s what his latest tax-and-spend multi-trillion dollar bill that he’s masquerading as an infrastructure bill is—a misleading mess of profligacy. Here’s some of what’s in it besides actual infrastructure monies.

  • $174 billion for electric vehicles
  • $400 billion on home-based care for the elderly and disabled
  • $25 billion on child care facilities
  • $50 billion on “research infrastructure” at the National Science Foundation
  • $213 billion for home sustainability and public housing
  • $35 billion+ for climate change R&D
  • $50 billion to create a new office at the Department of Commerce to “dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity and funding investments to support production of critical goods”
  • $30 billion to prepare for future pandemics
  • $45 billion so the Feds can buy “clean energy goods”
  • $14 billion “to bring together industry, academia, and government to advance technologies and capabilities critical to future competitiveness”

That’s more than $1 trillion out of Biden’s $2 trillion demand for his bill. Many of these things might actually be worthy projects—depending on pesky details—but they have no place in a real, legitimate infrastructure program.

And there’s this non sequitur that has no immediate cost, but it will reduce take-home pay of non-union members to no useful purpose and greatly limit our economy and drive up prices through greatly increased union costs:

[T]he PRO Act, which would essentially override right-to-work laws in states across the country, allowing unions to extract dues from workers who do not want to be members.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY):

It’s like a Trojan horse. Its called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse it’s going to be more borrowed money, and massive tax increases on all the productive parts of our economy.

Indeed. Dollars—trillions of dollars—out of our economy immediately and trillions more for the foreseeable future.

Earmarks

Progressive-Democrats in Congress are moving to bring these back. On this, I tend to agree.

Go ahead and do earmarks; they can be useful horse-trading tools. Just set aside 1% of the budget, the rough amount historically spent on them, as a separate line item.

Then require all earmarks in their aggregate to fit within that 1%, and require each earmark to be individually debated on the record and on the floor of the House and the Senate.

Let the public see, up front, what their tax dollars are paying for, and let the particular constituents see how effective their Congressman and Senator really are in representing them in each Congressional session.