President Biden “signed into law three massive bills handing out hundreds of billions of dollars of narrow tax breaks and spending subsidies to big corporations. It is the biggest gusher of corporate welfare ever,” explains an economist at the Cato Institute:
He has given huge tax breaks and spending subsidies to Big Semiconductor, Big Wind, Big Solar, Big Battery, Big Automaker, Big Utility, and so on…this is a Niagara Falls of subsidies flooding from Washington to the president’s favored industries and corporations. Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which increased federal subsidies by $548 billion. Tens of billions of dollars were handed out to railroads, electric utilities, broadband companies, the EV industry, and others. Biden signed the CHIPs … Act of 2022, which included $54 billion in subsidies, including $39 billion going to semiconductor companies.
Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which handed out $868 billion in energy subsidies, most of it to big corporations, including automakers, utilities, manufacturers, and hydrogen producers. Adam Michel finds that Biden’s energy tax subsidies could top $1.8 trillion. Biden rails against big corporations, but he has given them colossal subsidies.
The national debt will skyrocket due to Biden policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, whose actual cost is many times larger than Biden claimed when he tricked Senator Joe Manchin into supporting it, potentially adding over $2 trillion to the national debt. Biden claimed it would cost $433 billion, but financial experts at places like Goldman Sachs soon concluded it could cost $1.2 trillion or more. Now, the Cato Institute’s Travis Fisher says it could cost $3 trillion, and could undermine transmission reforms needed to provide adequate and affordable electricity to the American people.
President Biden’s big-spending policies caused inflation, according to even Democratic economists like Harvard’s Larry Summers — who was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton — and Obama economic advisor Steven Rattner. As Rattner noted in the New York Times, Biden spent “an unprecedented amount” of taxpayer money, which resulted in “too much money chasing too few goods.”
Biden’s proposed “Build Back Better” plan would lead to still more inflation, according to economists across the political spectrum. Former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf said it would “push up” inflation. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Marc Goldwein said it would create “inflationary pressures.” Bank of America’s Ethan Harris said it would “create even more price pressure.”
So would Biden’s proposed $2 trillion infrastructure package. Federal meddling in local infrastructure projects has already radically increased the cost of highways since the early 1970s, notes legal scholar Walter Olson. Spending per mile on interstate highway construction more than tripled, after taking inflation into account. Federal laws passed in 1970, 1972, and 1973 made it easier for citizens and special-interest groups to “contest infrastructure projects, driving up their cost and delaying their implementation and completion.”
The federal government delays local infrastructure projects with all sorts of unnecessary rules that other countries reject as wasteful and expensive. Construction of public infrastructure is slow and costly in the United States compared with Europe. New York City subways are a famous example: The Second Avenue line now being partially constructed — a century after it was originally proposed — costs six times as much as a comparable subway line in Paris. Dutch road crews built an entire highway overpass over a single weekend. Such rapid construction seldom happens in the U.S.
As infrastructure construction has slowed as a result, President Biden has proposed yet more federal meddling in intervention through his proposed $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which would make infrastructure more costly. Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards says Biden’s plan will damage America’s infrastructure while shrinking our economy. He calls it “Biden’s anti-infrastructure plan“. He notes that the “Tax Foundation estimated that Biden’s tax increases would reduce investment in fixed assets, including infrastructure, by more than $1 trillion,” harming private infrastructure such as “power stations, freight railways,” and “pipelines.”
Biden is spending tens of billions of dollars on harmful boondoggles that waste energy and increase traffic congestion.
