Biden spends like a maniac except for security, which gets a hatchet job
Quin Hillyer
Video Embed
Senate Republicans are right to say that President Joe Biden’s budget proposal proves that his priorities are dangerously out of whack. Out of touch with reality, too. Worst, he proposes to leave the nation’s defenses woefully short-changed.
For the third consecutive year, Biden’s proposed defense budget would not even come close to keeping up with inflation. With the Pentagon facing rising threats from China and a near-nuclear Iran, not to mention needing to replenish supplies and weapons sent to help Ukraine, the defense budget should be rising faster than inflation, not slower. The armed services also are having recruitment difficulties and major procurement delays. Yet with inflation clipping along at a 6% annual rate, Biden is asking for just 3% more for defense next year than this — obviously, a 3% decline in real terms.
The recklessness of Biden’s underfunding of the Pentagon is stunning.
BIDEN’S MIXED MESSAGE ON THE BUDGET
And it’s not as if Biden feels constrained overall by the need to rein in the huge deficits and debt his own policies have so horribly worsened. While short-changing soldiers, airmen, and sailors, he proposes spending on his other dubious “priorities” like thousands of those sailors not just drunk but on acid trips.
A Senate Republican chart lays it out clearly. While cutting defense in real dollars, Biden would increase outlays for the Environmental Protection Agency by 19%, agriculture by 14%, health services by 11%, the Commerce Department (home of subsidies to politically connected entities) by 11%, and his labor buddies also by 11%.
Oh — and while he trims defense after taking inflation into account, he tacks a hacksaw to homeland security. Its budget would actually drop by 1%, even before taking inflation into account. After the inflationary arithmetic, that’s a 7% cut, all as Biden’s self-created crisis at the southern border rages on, bringing drug smuggling, human trafficking, and crime in its fetid wake.
Oh — and get this: Even after providing $80 billion (over 10 years) in extra IRS spending last year over and above the usual IRS baseline, while directing most of it toward crackdowns against taxpayers rather than held desks for taxpayers, Biden now wants yet another 15% hike in the IRS budget.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In sum, Biden wants a bigger, bossier, and more intrusive government in every part of our lives, while doing less and less to protect us from foreign threats, terrorism, and criminal border incursions.
This budget is an outrage. The sooner this man leaves power, the better.