President Joe Biden’s early days in office do not bode well for the next three-plus years.
Changes to successful illegal immigration measures have created a true border catastrophe. This is readily demonstrated by record-breaking numbers of illegal aliens entering the country.
Some of those seeking asylum surrender to the Border Patrol; other illegals avoid capture when Border Patrol officers are moved from the border to tend to illegal aliens that overwhelm housing facilities, allowing illegals to stream into the country unimpeded.
Why not keep the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for those seeking asylum? That would reduce the number of people overloading holding facilities by temporarily returning the asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases are adjudicated.
Some of those avoiding Border Patrol are criminals, gang members, drug dealers, and some are on the terrorist watch list. And, there are significant numbers of all illegals that test positive for the coronavirus.
And the administration is considering a conditional cash transfer program to help address economic problems that encourage Central Americans to head north. A New York Post story said the administration is “considering sending cash payments to Central Americans in order to dissuade them from making the journey to the United States,” actually paying people not to come to the United States. Like that is going to work.
Illegal immigration is Biden’s most visible and dangerous calamity. So far.
And then there is the idea of “packing” the Supreme Court.
Biden has said in the past that he is not a fan of Court packing, and called it “a bonehead idea.” Packing would involve adding activist justices to the Court who would apply their personal political and ideological philosophies to their legal rulings.
However, despite his not being a fan, Biden has appointed a commission of mostly liberals to look into various aspects of the Court, including adding justices and placing term limits on justices.
However, in addition to Biden, many other people oppose the idea of packing the Court, including former Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away last September, and current Associate Justice Steven Breyer.
During an interview on National Public Radio in 2019, liberal Justice Ginsburg made it clear that she opposed such proposals. "If anything would make the Court look partisan," she said, "it would be that — one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'" She added that it "was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court" in 1937.
In remarks prepared earlier this month for delivery at Harvard Law School, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said, in what ABC News termed a stark public warning, that "It is wrong to think of the Court as another political institution," he continued, "And it is doubly wrong to think of its members as junior league politicians."
Prior to being elected, Biden campaigned on repealing the tax cuts made by then-President Donald Trump as one of his highest priorities, if elected.
In order to defend tax increases, Democrats play down the effects of the Trump reductions in tax rates. The Washington Examiner noted last October that “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has dismissed any benefit to the middle class as ‘crumbs,’ while presidential candidate Joe Biden has said that $1.3 trillion of these tax cuts went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wage earners.”
The Washington Post fact-checker gave Biden’s claim that the middle class did not see a tax cut its highest rating of four Pinocchios for being factually deficient.
The Trump economic policy changes resulted in the unemployment rate dropping to a 50-year low 3.5 percent in 2019. And, median household income rose by $4,440 or 6.8 percent, which is the largest one-year wage growth in history.
Taxpayers in Pennsylvania and Colorado earning between $50,000 and $100,000 saw their tax liability drop by over 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively, while households with incomes over $1 million saw their tax liability drop by just 3.1 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.
The Examiner also reported that the doubling of the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 not only reduced taxes for families, “but the number of households claiming the credit increased from 22 million to 36 million.”
When Trump cut tax rates, it helped generate an economic upswing and benefitted millions of not-wealthy families and individuals.
Biden, however, wants to raise more than $2 trillion over 15 years by increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, the global minimum tax to 21 percent, and placing a 15 percent levy on book income for the largest corporations, and corporate inversion.
Will that money be used to pay down the enormous $28.1 trillion national debt? No, it will be used to support so-called infrastructure, most of which is not what is considered infrastructure, such as manufacturing, $300 billion; electric vehicles, $170 billion, et al. These are corporate subsidies, not infrastructure.
Where will that additional tax money come from? Higher prices, lost jobs and other undesirable actions.
This is bad spending policy funded by bad tax policy.
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