Come on, admit it -- it’s been morbidly humorous and curiously revealing to see Democrats crabbing at each other over the size of the spending bills they’re proposing this year, each
opportunistic leftist deathly afraid that their own pet project won’t make the ultimate cut and be headed to senile president Joe Biden’s desk for his scribbled signature.
Watching the scrum from afar, it’s like gazing at frenzied and annoyed carrion birds tugging at a roadkill carcass, the problem being there are far too many beaks and not enough meat to rip from the unfortunate victim’s bones.
Earlier this week it was reported that Democrats were scrambling to ensure that their individual priorities would be included in the final, a slightly reduced fat version that Nancy Pelosi and Chucky Schumer will present to their respective caucuses for an up or down vote. Based on media reports, Democrats are nearing the end of the process, which only amped up the urgency for the liberal vultures to get their pound of pork-bill flesh secured in the text’s thousands of pages.
The closer they get, the redder their faces become. Jordain Carney and Cristina Marcos reported at The Hill:
“Progressives are scrambling to save top priorities that risk being scaled down or axed from President Biden’s social spending plan as Democratic leadership and the White House race to get a deal...
“Democrats, after closed-door caucus meetings on Tuesday, said that they were still ironing out paid family leave, climate change provisions and a tax targeting billionaires. Democrats are still trying to win over support from moderates for expansions of Medicaid and Medicare, with the party viewing the bill as its best shot in years to enact sweeping health care legislation...
“Progressives have already seen some key priorities sidelined, including higher corporate tax rates and the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which incentivizes companies toward clean energy sources. Paid family and medical leave could also be on the chopping block, after Biden already pared it down last week from the original 12 proposed weeks to just four weeks.”
This is truly astonishing. The Democrats’ posturing is summed up thusly: Leadership says, “we’ve still got trillions’ worth of goodies in here, and no bill is perfect” while the rabid leftists counter, “we’re not signing on until the numbers are firm and we get everything we want and we promised our gimme-gimme voter crowd that we would bring it to them on a silver platter made possible by some rich and successful person who’s not paying their fair share.”
All of it financed with other people’s money. It’s a luxury to be a liberal, isn’t it? Democrats sit around caucus rooms in the big white marble building on a hill and trade back-and-forths over which new welfare program gets what and how many zeroes will go where. Oh yeah, and how much Americans will get to keep of their own money.
Then there’s the senile old coot down the road in the big White House trying to act as a go-between for a couple “moderates” who object to zeroes and set-asides for a couple issue areas. One hopes there’s plenty of taxpayer funded, culturally-sensitive snacks being ordered to last through the negotiating sessions. If they’re wise, Democrats could secure sedatives for Bernie Sanders, too, because if he doesn’t get what he’s demanding, he’s likely to have another heart attack.
Thinking about it, what the Democrats are planning with their spending schemes is about the same as world leaders meeting in Scotland next week to discuss “climate change” and hopefully to set emissions goals for nations to abide by. Senile Joe will be there with “bells on”, but China’s and Russia’s presidents are skipping the conference, no doubt recognizing that the hot air emanating from the bloviating chests of the worry warts will exceed even the most pessimistic of climate doomsday scenarios.
Biden will undoubtedly pledge compliance and “leadership” for the United States well into the future (zero emissions by 2050?), in essence making promises for future presidents to conform to, long after he’s passed from the seat of power (and likely from the earth as well). Why tie the hands of Americans decades into the future? Power is everything! Well, not the fossil-fuel burning kind.
If Congress is formulating welfare initiatives that will be paid for by our children’s grandchildren, why not get the entire world’s poor on the hook, too?
The capital to fund the climate and welfare pipedreams doesn’t exist, which basically means Democrats are playing poker with our chips, tossing out a few here and there while pontificating about “needs” and struggles of unnamed people in the United States. Like sure, at the top of everyone’s Christmas list is a renegotiated drug price inside Medicare. What a farce.
Forget for a moment where the money is going to come from. Practically speaking, Democrats are ignoring one of the biggest roadblocks to full implementation of a new welfare utopia.
Question: Where are you going to get the people to do the work? Suppose that Democrats actually pass their gigantic (even if scaled back) welfare monstrosity. The programs will require new bureaucracy to administer them coast-to-coast, which will further increase competition for workforce labor in many, many locations. The government will thus battle with private businesses and companies for these folks. This will drive up wages, which will force prices and inflation to skyrocket.
Don’t count on the “woke” and entitled college graduates to physically sweat for any amount of money, either.
Further, pulling people out of the private labor force will only exacerbate the problems we’re currently experiencing in the “supply chain”, since the government does not employ the dock workers, freight personnel (train and trucking) and retail employees at the final link of the chain. These industries are already stretched to the limit to recruit able-bodied workers who aren’t slouching off due to COVID-19 or aren’t intimidated by stupid, privacy invading government vaccine mandates.
Naturally, if these things are funded by Congress, government bureaucrats will be charged with allocating resources to specific locations and following “guidelines” in hiring men and women to carry out the program’s stated purpose. This serves as a major disrupter to local flow of goods and services, which will escalate inflation and create scarcity and artificial shortages.
Okay, enough of the economics jargon.
Analogize it to a highway construction project. We’ve all seen them, sometimes more than we’d care to. They typically share one thing in common -- a host of large, diesel-powered heavy equipment, most of which is sitting idle at any given moment with a gaggle of yellow vested “workers” with hard hats standing around watching while one or two guys dig a ditch or chat with a dump truck driver. A couple more schleps are tasked with holding “Stop” or “Slow” signs fixed on the front and back, communicating through a walkie-talkie and allowing one unblocked lane to service the stack of cars in both directions.
If the Democrats succeed, our economy will become one huge proverbial highway construction project that will suck up labor and pay “employees” to stand around half the time while the deadline for completion comes and goes. Then the government entities will complain about uncooperative weather or that they can’t find enough domestic applicants to fill vacancies. Imagine this issue is systemwide across the nation instead of simply delaying traffic in your vicinity.
This is what results when you’ve got government pushing and pulling the levers of power, infringing and invading the private sector, which is much more efficient -- because it has to be. Profit-driven companies only hire for their needs and work their people to the bone for a fair wage and earned benefits, doing so because they want to keep the best workers for future projects. That’s what the working world is all about.
And no, don’t suggest that the Biden administration’s open borders policy would solve the labor problem with millions of new illegal alien toilers. These “undocumented” persons are coming to sponge off the government dole, not to receive highly technical training to operate machinery and devise new formulas for assembling “climate change” solar panels and windmills (which are made in China anyway).
Yet another ill effect of passing nationwide welfare programs is to keep people at home rather than searching for or working at a job. Universal family leave sounds like a beneficial thing, but the more you pay someone not to work, the more likely they are to accept it. How is allowing people not to work and still get paid going to solve anything?
While it might be temporarily funny to see Democrats scurrying around like rats outside a Chicago restaurant in search of a partisan consensus agreement to appropriate trillions of dollars of other people’s money, the hilarity won’t last long. There’s more at issue when politicians spend so irresponsibly. Think of this the next time you’re delayed at a construction site.
Democrat Congress
$3.5 trillion budget reconciliation
Donald Trump
Nancy Pelosi
Chuck Schumer
Democrat moderates
Joe Manchin
Kyrsten Sinema
federal debt
national debt
inflation
supply chain