Tag Archives: spending

What’s in Harris’ Econ Plans?

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s an overview.

  • federal limits on price increases for food producers and grocers
  • legislation creating a new series of tax incentives for builders who construct “starter” homes sold to first-time homebuyers
  • $40 billion innovation fund for businesses building affordable rental housing units
  • provide $25,000 in potential down payment assistance to help some renters buy a home
  • accelerate Medicare and other federal programs to “negotiate” with drugmakers to lower the cost of prescription medications
  • work with state entities to cancel $7 billion of medical debt for up to 3 million qualifying Americans
  • make permanent a $3,600 per child tax credit
  • new $6,000 tax credit for those with newborn children
  • cut taxes for some frontline workers by up to $1,500

Each one of these is inflationary in its own right, and each one will drive a need to increase taxes in order to pay for them.

It seems to me—and the press is complicit in this, however unintentionally, with its focus—that Harris’ plan for price controls on those food producers and grocers to combat what she’s pleased to call “price gouging” is nothing but a distraction to draw attention away from her other proposals in order to get many of them enacted unnoticed.

Yes and No

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened one of their Friday editorials with this:

On taxes and spending, he [Minnesota Progressive-Democrat Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Vice President nominee-in-waiting Tim Walz] has sought to outdo California progressives and is making Illinois look like a model of fiscal discipline.
Ms Harris is slipstreaming behind the Biden Administration policies and refusing to lay out her own policy agenda. This makes Mr Walz’s record as Governor over the last six years all the more revealing as a window on the duo’s plans for the country.

It’s certainly true that Walz’s behavior as governor is demonstrative. It is, though, not entirely “all the more revealing” of a Harris-Walz profligate tax and more profligate spend policy, should they get elected. The editors make that clear in their own words, for all that they seem not to recognize that: Ms Harris is slipstreaming behind the Biden Administration policies.

Harris is not at all “refusing to lay out her own policy agenda.” The Biden-Harris policies are precisely the policies she’s intent on continuing, and that extends far beyond economics. Harris, and Walz beside her, are intent on continuing the Biden-Harris open borders policy, and they’re intent on continuing the Biden-Harris policy of speaking loudly while carrying no stick at all regarding our nation’s most dangerous enemies, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and Iran.

Harris’ slipstreaming is her statement, if not in so many words, of the policies she intends to pursue in a Harris-Walz administration.

Spending vs Revenue

Posted on by
Reply

…in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s world.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have this one right.

CBO projects that this year’s budget deficit will clock in at roughly $2 trillion, some $400 billion more than it forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit.
…
Notably, CBO’s revenue projections are little changed. Revenue is expected to total 17.2% of GDP this year—roughly the 50-year average before the pandemic….

So, whence the deficit explosion? Plainly, it’s in all that spending that the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Party syndicate in the House and Senate insist on doing.

CBO significantly revised up projections for federal spending. Outlays are now expected to hit 24.2% of GDP this year and average 24% over the next decade. Wow.

Mind you, that’s against a steadily, if slowly, growing GDP. That projection means that Party spending will be growing, too. All while revenue remains steady—which is to say, flat/not growing.

This is the politicians of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s utter inability to say “cut spending,” which plays into their inability actually to cut spending. After all, the money, in their minds, isn’t real; it’s only monopoly money, and if they need want more dollars, they have only to go to their Modern Monetary Policy money tree and pick more dollar bills from the branches.

The reality, though, is that the money Progressive-Democrats demand to spend is our money. Those politicians have no skin in the game beyond their political power. The skin us average Americans have in this game is real: our ability to get along in the real (and real economic) world in which we live, having as we do, only those real dollars that Party policies steadily devalue.

We need to remember that this November.

One More Reason…

Posted on by
Reply

The Environmental Protection Agency is turning more and more into a Progressive-Democratic Party agenda protection agency and less and less devoted to protecting our environment. Recall that the EPA has been busily using some of its Inflation Reduction Act funding allocation to fund an outfit backing anti-Israel protests. It turns out that the EPA is using another tranche of its IRA allocation to fund groups that oppose immigration enforcement. The EPA received $3 billion for Environmental and Climate Justice block grants.

Here’s what the EPA is doing with those dollars:

EPA tapped Fordham University as a grantmaker to distribute $50 million, in collaboration with the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) and the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ).

Aside from those agencies having nothing to do with climate, as the WSJ‘s editors note (I note, also, that climate is only peripherally related to the EPA’s environment DOC), the NYIC (at the least) sees its immigration role as one of defunding and getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This is just one more reason to abolish the EPA altogether and return its personnel, from Secretary on down to the janitors, to the private sector.

We do need an agency of some sort to protect the environment, but not this one, which is so badly damaged that it cannot be rehabilitated. The replacement needn’t be a huge and sprawling agency devoted to pseudo-science (atmospheric CO2 is more pollutant than plant food?), and so what’s used for the EPA’s budget needn’t be so monstrously huge, either. The difference could even be used to pay down some small part of the debt the Progressive-Democratic Party has been inflicting on our federal government.

A Progressive-Democrat Governor and a Surtax

Posted on by
Reply

New Jersey’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Phil Murphy once promised to let the State’s 2.5% surtax on businesses with incomes greater than $1 million expire and then, by implication, to leave it alone. He did the first part, and it did expire. But it turns out he dissembled on the second part.

Mr Murphy and his [Progressive-]Democratic Legislature are scrambling for money even though tax revenue has increased 35% over the past five years—faster than inflation.
…
Mr Murphy now wants to re-impose it on income above $10 million, retroactively to the start of this year.

Progressive-Democrats are so addicted to taxing Americans and our businesses that their promises to lower taxes or to leave alone existing taxes are worthless. Which calls into question the value of any other of their promises. Indeed, their addiction is so powerful that they’re not capable even of saying the words “cut spending,” much less actually doing so.

Maybe Murphy’s renewed surtax will hit only the wealthiest businesses, many based in other states, hard enough to persuade those in New Jersey to relocate to more business—and average American—friendly locations and persuade those based in other States to reduce or forgo doing business in New Jersey.