New York Post: Democrats' Massive Spending Plans Will Blow Up US Budget for Generations

Article by Brian Riedl in New York Post

“It’s going to cost nothing,” President Biden said of the Democrats’ massive $3.5 trillion spending binge, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is scrambling to pass this week.

Don’t believe it. The bill, which aims to move America closer to a European-style social-welfare state, will shorten the fuse on a debt bomb that’s already set to detonate.

Last year, lawmakers enacted $3 trillion in (mostly) justified deficit spending for a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Yet the 2021 spending blowout is set to dwarf those costs. Lawmakers have already enacted a $1.9 trillion “stimulus” bill filled with unnecessary items like unemployment benefits that exceed the wages for many available jobs, and bailouts to states already running budget surpluses. The Senate has passed a $550 billion infrastructure bill that is financed mostly with gimmicks. Biden’s 8.4 percent discretionary spending increase would permanently raise the baseline by $1 trillion over the decade.

And now, Democrats are trying to pass a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that would raise deficits by as much as $1.75 trillion. Even those figures understate the bill’s true cost by at least $1 trillion by pretending that policies like the expanded child tax credit will expire within a few years, even though the Democrats’ policy is to make them permanent.

Add it all up, and congressional Democrats are set to commit $8 trillion in new spending over the decade, of which $6 trillion would be borrowed. That is quadruple the net cost of the 2017 tax cuts.

All this debt has a permanent cost. If interest rates ever nudge back up past 3 percent, this year’s $6 trillion borrowing spree will cost $180 billion in additional interest costs every year, forever. That’s $180 billion annually that could otherwise provide tax relief, assist veterans, or improve infrastructure. Instead, it will pay interest to bond holders. What a waste of tax dollars.

This year’s Democratic spending binge is not the end of the story. Biden still has $3 trillion in leftover campaign promises covering Social Security, health care, higher education and other issues. If his entire agenda is enacted, the national debt held by the public — which was just under $17 trillion before the pandemic — would reach $44 trillion a decade from now.

The long-term danger is that today’s irresponsible government borrowing is set to collide with .....

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