The headlines this week from Democrats’ bumbling, stumbling budget negotiations have focused on their inability to get agreement on Joe Biden’s massive cradle-to-grave reformation of the relationship between the individual and the state. Democrats claim these trillion-dollar proposals are free – they’re “taxing the rich” to pay for them.
But are they? It’s worth taking a look at who Democrats are taxing, and who they’re protecting. For all the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style rhetoric, the burden of their budget proposal falls squarely on America’s middle class. The left-of-center Tax Policy Center recently assessed that Biden’s proposal would result in higher taxes in 2022 for 74 percent of middle-class earners.
Moreover, the Joint Committee on Taxation recently pointed out that Democrats’ desire to raise the corporate tax rate, undoing the Trump administration’s tax cuts, will be passed on to workers. According to the Tax Foundation, 70 percent of a corporate tax increase is borne by labor.
All of this is exacerbated by the perilous state of our economy, which is seeing supply chains in tangles, the core inflation rate at the highest it’s been in 30 years and climbing, and thousands of blue-collar workers – considered heroes a year ago – being laid off for refusing vaccine mandates. Thousands more middle-class jobs will be put at risk by the Democrats’ “climate agenda,” which seeks to make fossil fuels, and the good-paying jobs that come with them, obsolete.
Democrats may have razor-thin majorities in Congress, but these proposals are nothing short of an attempt to remake America’s permanent political and economic order. Seen in this light, their latest overreach is terrifying. But it’s also terrifyingly familiar. For today the far left is poisoning the public with repeated doses of this kind of unprecedented, un-American usurpation.
Congressional Democrats are talking up a plan to have the IRS spy on every American who deposits more than $600 in his or her bank account. That was the same week that Big Tech leftists were exposed for manipulating high-tech surveillance tools to turn American kids into social media addicts.
Biden’s attorney general recently ordered the FBI to investigate parents for simply exercising their First Amendment rights to oppose critical race theory and trans extremism at local school board meetings. For standing up for their kids, moms and dads have been branded by Democrats as “domestic terrorists.”
At the Southern border, Biden is not just ignoring the law and allowing illegal immigrants into the country. He’s been chartering secret flights in the middle of the night to resettle them into the nation’s cities. Now he wants to give $450,000 to each illegal alien separated from his family – even as millions of Americans are slogging through Biden’s broken economy to find jobs that pay a fraction of that.
In state and local governments across the country, politicians and bureaucrats are telling parents to stay out of their own children’s education. This isn’t North Korea. In the United States, parents have always been their kids’ primary educators.
Meanwhile, a year after leftist elites demanded America defund our police departments, we’re in the middle of a national crime wave. In our wokest cities, rioting has become routine, the homeless have taken over the streets and sidewalks, and retail stores are closing because cops are no longer allowed to arrest shoplifters.
Despite a year of scientific evidence clarifying COVID-19’s risks, Democrats are still using the illness as an excuse to needlessly mask children, cruelly fire moms and dads, and intimidate the public into obedience to health officials who have been caught in lies and hypocrisy since the virus first escaped from the Chinese lab where Anthony Fauci paid communists to create it.
This isn’t a dispute about tax rates, or trade agreements, or health policy. Those are part of the normal back-and-forth of American politics.
What the left is up to today is different. They do not seek to reform the law, but to dynamite the moral foundations beneath it: Law enforcement. Public safety. Legal citizenship. Personal privacy. Parental authority. Property rights. And popular and national sovereignty.
All of sudden, for the first time in history – from Biden’s White House to Bernie Sanders’ Senate to Ocasio-Cortez’s House, to the news media, Big Tech monopolies, and college campuses – a supposedly majority party has openly declared war on the very ideals of equal human rights and the rule of law upon which America has flourished since 1776.
When Biden became president, some thought he would spend his term trying to undo all of the successes of the previous four years under Donald Trump. But now it seems his real plan is to undo the successes of the previous 230 years, under presidents like Reagan, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, and all the way back to George Washington.
The left doesn’t just want to cancel some Americans; they want to cancel America, period.