[guest post by JVW]
This may not be too surprising, but it certainly is infuriating. From Dan McLaughlin at NRO:
[. . .] The RealClearPolitics poll average currently shows [President Biden’s] approval on the economy at 38.2 percent, with 59.2 percent disapproving. You don’t need an advanced degree in mathematics to grasp how bad that is. Biden’s short-lived effort to embrace “Bidenomics” as a label for this economy was such a disaster that even most Democrats have stopped trying to spin this.
The most glaring economic misstep of Biden’s presidency was pouring additional trillions of dollars into the economy — and planning even more than that — at a time when post-Covid supply shortages and pent-up demand were already generating inflationary pressures around the world. So, what are progressives urging Biden to do? More unsustainable government spending[.]
The link is to a Politico piece which explains that left-wing groups are urging the President to make an expansion of Social Security for the poor into a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection campaign. This is positioned by the author of the piece, one Adam Cancryn, as a natural follow-up to President Biden’s success in getting House Republicans to forswear any cuts in entitlement programs, even as our annual deficit has nearly doubled over the past year. Progressives promise the President that this plan will be massively popular among senior citizens, a key demographic that has trended Republican in past Presidential elections. The plan would be a rehashing of the Biden Campaign’s 2020 pledge to expand Social Security for the lowest-income recipients and (allegedly) pay for it by raising taxes on people making more than $400,000 per year, which was abandoned in the face of narrow Democrat majorities in Congress.
Left unsaid by the author, who clearly wants to focus on the political aspect of the program and how it will affect next year’s elections, is whether a nation that is on its way to accumulating $34 trillion in debt is wise to bump up spending on the second-largest item in the entire federal budget. Of course using a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans to (allegedly) pay for increases in spending elsewhere in the budget is nothing new; Democrats have already suggested this expected revenue windfall go towards student loan forgiveness, green initiatives, infrastructure plans, subsidizing health insurance, and a whole raft of social programs favored by the donkey party. As Dan McLaughlin points out, anybody with the least bit of common sense understands that none of these programs will be fully paid for by tax increases, and thus deficit spending is bound to climb. This underfunded program would also have the baleful effect of the government yet again printing money and releasing it into the economy, thereby exacerbating Bidenflation which puts us on the fast track to Bidensolvency.
It could be that the Presidential election of 2024 will ultimately be seen as a quest for the poisoned chalice, with the victor getting to be the poor fool who presides over the next economic collapse in this nation and thus will bear much of the blame (though we all know the media/academic/entertainment cerberus will spin it as primarily a failure of GOP leadership, with Democrats only being assigned a small portion of the fault). So in that case, the logic might go, why not let President Magoo and his Cabinet of Misfits be the ones to steer us into the ditch. I would rather we face — and, radical notion, solve — our problems, but that’s a bit much to ask of a society that has grown fat, pampered, and restless on massive debt.
– JVW