Biden’s 2024 Federal Budget Proposal Extends Helicopter Government

It appears that instead of a federal fiscal budget that sticks to the basics, we are growing accustomed to an ambitious central government that doubles its spending every generation or so on new and exciting things that it probably ought not be doing.

Both of Biden’s State of the Union addresses — like those of his former boss Barack Obama — called for more spending, regulation and, most unfortunately, dependency. The new $6.8 trillion 2024 fiscal budget proposal unveiled online and touted by Biden in Pennsylvania follows through on that vision with a bewildering array of programs and social engineering projects. Next year’s deficit would be $1.8 trillion.

To fund billions in renewable-energy projects, “environmental justice” programs, child-care subsidies, universal pre-kindergarten, national paid leave and other incarnations of helicopter government, Biden promises more levies on corporations and the wealthy (whose top marginal tax rate would rise to just under 40 percent). Domestic spending hikes also target the “climate crisis,” a term used 27 times in the budget proposal.

It took from the founding to the late 1980s Reagan era for the United States to reach a nominal $1 trillion budget. In the George W. Bush administraiton we saw the first $2 trillion and $3 trillion budgets. The financial crisis brought the first $4 trillion budget, after which COVID found us topping $6 trillion under Trump. Biden now unapologetically outstrips that level despite the pandemic being in the rear-view mirror.

In contrast to a return to fiscal normalcy and a genuine version of the “bottom-up, middle-out” growth Biden invokes (p. 1), the administration’s actions are defined by top-down central planning newly reinforced by the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure law, the Inflation Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. Celebrated in the new budget, all of these are as highly regulatory as they are costly.

Biden’s “Minimum Tax on Billionaires” proposal is back (p. 44) with an eye on taxing the richest even on unsold assets, an astonishing and disquieting development marking an important step for the progressives’ broader wealth tax. The “fair share” for the wealthiest 0.01 percent at the moment is apparently 25 percent.

Is America really going to benefit from handing off these extraordianry sums to the federal government? Hardly, but the the opposition is weak. Indeed much of the spending of which Biden boasts is bipartisan, and certainly the political parties are united on the “protect Social Security and Medicare” riff rather than looking to major overhauls — such as exempting the unborn that never get a say in the scheme. Bipartisan support for defense increases despite the talk of exiting “forever wars” seems boundless.

The last budget surplus occurred under Clinton in 2001. Biden boasts, not of a plan to eliminate the deficit over the coming decade, but to cut it by what it would otherwise have been hypothetically in Minecraft by $3 trillion. The claim is highly suspect since the projections assign $500 billion of the reduction to the year 2033. As it stands, interest on the $31.4 trillion debt will alone top $10 trillion over the decade. Deficits never end, but “stabilize,” according to the proposal, at around five percent of the entire economy. We run out of billionaires before we run out of red ink.

Of course, presidential budgets are often DOA as written, since, as holder of the purse strings, Congress pushes its own priorities. Still, the Biden budget highlights more similarities than differences with mainstream Republicans, who are equal co-conspirators in the recent infrastructure and technology spending that erects government/business partnerships and heavy regulatory edifices where free enterprise should instead reign supreme.

We find ourselves bound to multiple trillions of dollars for projects, programs and interventions in which the federal government ought not be engaging in the first place. Democrats and Republicans alike adhere to the theory that Washington will do better things with all that money than either you or the billionaires. Limited government is cast aside, as spending and attendant regulation increasingly displace not just private business activity but ordinary household roles and functions.

Biden’s budget is animated by what he calls “whole-of-government” approaches to advance policies on “equity” (ssee the Budget’s “Fact Sheet”), “climate crisis,” “competition policy” and more. Supervision and oversight cannot be expected in this setting, since Biden’s interventionist-oriented spending comes after his having dismantled not merely predecessor Donald Trump’s regulatory streamlining, but regulatory restraint as such.

So as the debt limit battle looms, Republicans have some reflecting to do. Politicians often indulge in pseudo debate over the federal government’s relative expenditures on entitlement, military, and domestic discretionary categories when they are each excessive. Autopilot spending is the creature of both parties, and bringing it back under control is becoming insurmountably difficult under helicopter government. If middle-class and adult dependency on Washington are the new normal, what political constituency for federal budget cuts will remain?

Biden’s vision of a custodial, caretaker state is his primary pursuit. Policymakers need to appreciate the significance of that, and replace it with an emphasis on gutting spending, slashing red tape, abolishing agencies and programs and fostering a healthy and unfettered economy alongside independent, resilient and self-reliant households and communities. When the economy thrives and jobs are abundant, Americans help themselves and their families and neighbors, can better provide more secure retirements and health care for themselves, and can be less vulnerable to getting seduced by Washingon’s political opportunists.

As Washington fails to police itself, state and local leaders are likely to find the recent spending sprees adding to their unfunded mandates. That could spark interest in campaigns to roll back federal red tape and over-regulation as well as the spending featured in the new budget, and to leave that money in the states where it originated and rightly belongs.

The fiscal budget does not constrain spending, let alone reduce it. The economic damage of our current trajectory can be severe, especially if interest rates continue to rise. As an alternative to Biden’s helicopter government, cutting spending can boost enterprise and prosperity. Meanwhile, sweeping actions to reduce unnecessary economic, environmental, social and paperwork regulation could reduce deficits as an unintended consequence. Whatever the mix, the foundation for an altherative to federal spending sprees ought to be laid during this year’s budget and debt limit debates.