Tag Archives: American jobs plan

How Much Does It Cost?

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Yesterday The Daily Wire posted an article about the budget reconciliation plan that is currently working its way through Congress.

The article reports:

A group of analysts predicts that Congressional Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plan could actually cost up to $5.5 trillion.

As The Daily Wire recently reported, lawmakers are attempting to ram spending proposals through Congress without Republican approval. Their budget incorporates portions of President Biden’s American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan.

The Committee for a Responsible Budget has stated the following:

While the actual cost of this new legislation will ultimately depend heavily on details that have yet to be revealed, we estimate the policies under consideration could cost between $5 trillion and $5.5 trillion over a decade, assuming they are made permanent. In order to fit these proposals within a $3.5 trillion budget target, lawmakers apparently intend to have some policies expire before the end of the ten-year budget window, using this oft-criticized budget gimmick to hide their true cost.

…Based on these sources, we estimate policies in the fact sheet would cost about $5 trillion over a ten-year period. Including additional policies not explicitly mentioned but rumored to be part of the package, and incorporating possible estimating differences between the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the cost could rise to $5.5 trillion.

The article concludes:

Economists from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School explain that deficit spending discourages investment in private ventures, thereby cutting innovation and business growth:

The government collects real resources via voluntary transactions with economic agents who are willing to trade real resources today for the promise of real resources in the future. Debt buyers, including U.S. households saving for retirement, view this debt as savings, which reduces their savings in private investment. This substitution is called the ‘capital crowding-out effect’ from government debt issuance.

With $1 trillion in deficit spending, capital stock would fall 0.78% by 2050; with $10 trillion in spending, capital stock would fall by 8.59%.

If you add tax increases to that picture, the future of the American economy looks even worse.

The Democrats Are Still Going After Single-Family Housing

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Just the News reported yesterday that the budget bill the Democrats in the House of Representatives are currently drafting may include the Democrat’s plan to “eliminate exclusionary zoning” for single-family homes in America’s cities. This is the bill that the Democrats plan on passing in the Senate by using the reconciliation process, meaning that the Republicans have no way to stop it.

The article reports:

A portion of President Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan offers grants to cities that “take concrete steps” to end “exclusionary zoning” for single-family homes.

Under a section titled “Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies,” Biden’s jobs plan argues that “for decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities.”

According to the White House fact sheet on the plan, which has not been formally drafted into legislation yet, Biden is “calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

The article notes:

The $1.2 trillion infrastructure agreement that a bipartisan group of senators reached with the White House does not mention exclusionary zoning. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats would seek to pass the parts of Biden’s jobs plan and $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that are left out of the bipartisan framework on infrastructure.

Michigan Democrat Sen. Debbie Stabenow, chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, said the Democrat-led Congress should enact Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda instead of only focusing on the bipartisan agreement on physical infrastructure spending.

“It’s not just a slogan, we want to come out of this stronger than ever, and the bipartisan effort on infrastructure is one piece of that,” said Stabenow, a member of the Senate Budget Committee. “But we need to do the rest of what needs to be done in the jobs plan and the family plan to really meet the needs of our economy and our families.”

It should be noted that the tax and spend programs that the Democrats are trying to pass will ultimately hurt American families. As inflation increase, the spending power of every American decreases. As the price of a gallon of gasoline increase, it is essentially a tax increase on every American. The current policies being supported by the Democrat party will negatively impact the American economy and all Americans.

Definitely Heading Down The Wrong Path

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The Epoch Times posted an article yesterday (updated today) about President Biden’s first 100 days in office. The article notes that the moderate, unifying President we were promised during the election campaign has not shown up yet.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump and conservative pundits warned for months during the 2020 campaign that behind then-candidate Joe Biden’s centrist, bipartisan façade lay a radical liberal agenda to transform the United States. Biden has proven them right in less than 100 days, earning praise from liberal observers who are drawing historical comparisons to the tenure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, written along the outline of Biden’s proposal, dwarfs FDR’s New Deal in terms of total cost to the American taxpayer. Democrats rammed the measure through Congress without any Republican support, proving Biden was the partisan that critics had warned about.

The Democratic president’s proposed infrastructure measures—the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan—would bring the total price tag to an estimated $5.4 trillion, while ushering in a wave of welfare programs unseen since the introduction of Medicare and food stamps. The cost splits up to more than $43,000 per household and more than the combined wealth of all the billionaires in America. Democrats could enact both plans without any Republican support, by using, for the first time ever, the reconciliation process more than once in a budget year.

The fiscal scale and radical nature of the agenda, coupled with the razor-thin House and Senate majorities the Democrats are using to implement it, are exerting pressure on an American system of governance that has historically demanded a measure of bipartisanship in order to enact transformative change.

The article concludes:

Though his cabinet wouldn’t admit it, Biden inherited a successful vaccine development and distribution program from Trump. This meant that Biden’s campaign promise of injecting 100 million Americans with the vaccine against the CCP virus in his first 100 days was on track to being fulfilled even before he took office on Jan. 20. After eluding questions about raising the target to a more ambitious figure, Biden doubled the goal to 200 million. The administration is now on pace to triple the initial goal by April 29, his 100th day in office.

That tangible highlight is offset by the crisis on the southern border, which some experts say was triggered by Biden’s revocation of Trump-era immigration policies. Illegal aliens are crossing the border in numbers unseen in decades, forcing immigration authorities to overload shelters for housing detained minors. After weeks of avoidance, Biden finally called the situation a crisis earlier this month.

The White House has signaled that it intends to solve the crisis by investing in the countries the illegal aliens are fleeing from. Over the past two decades, the United States has spent billions in foreign aid to the nations in question.

Biden’s approval ratings have fluctuated between the high-40s and mid-50s during his first three months in office, according to Rasmussen, the only pollster conducting daily presidential approval surveys. The media may be contributing to that outcome. A recent Media Research Center study showed that evening news coverage of Biden was 59 percent positive during his first three months in office, compared to just 11 percent positive coverage during the same period in Trump’s presidency.

A supportive media cannot cover up the negative impact of President Biden’s policies forever. As inflation increases (as a result of the runaway spending) and the influx of illegal immigrants further increases federal spending, Americans may begin to believe what they see rather than what they are being told.

Acceptable Return On Investment?

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Yesterday Just the News reported that the jobs plan that is proposed by President Biden could cost taxpayers more than $666,666 per job created. The cost of the proposal is $2 trillion. Seems like a lot of money to pay for the creation of one job. The obvious question here is ‘how much does each job pay and where is the rest of the money going?’.

The article reports:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that House Democrats hope to draft the formal legislation for the American Jobs Plan by May and finalize it by July 4. The White House fact sheet about the plan includes a description of key parts of the proposal but does not list the specific infrastructure projects the bill would fund. 

Democrats are considering using budget reconciliation to move the bill through Congress to avoid the filibuster in the Senate. Democrats used that strategy for the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that Biden signed last month.

If you are not yet familiar with the Cloward-Piven strategy, now would be a really good time to look it up.

The article concludes by reminding us of some past history:

Biden oversaw the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. The Obama administration estimated that the bill would “create or save” 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2009. Politifact rated former President Obama’s claim in May 2009 that the bill “saved or created” 150,000 jobs as “mostly false.”

At the time, Republicans as well as some political and economic analysts argued that it was difficult to measure how many jobs a piece of legislation could “save.” In the end, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in November 2010 that the number of saved or created jobs fell somewhere between 1.4 million and 3.6 million.

Déjà vu all over again.