It is important to understand the massive extent of the spending increase the Biden administration is considering.
The Biden administration is reportedly considering a package of bills to add $3 trillion in new infrastructure, education, and climate-change spending to the federal budget. While the New York Times reporting on this is anonymously sourced, it is entirely plausible: It has the hallmarks of a trial balloon floated by people in the administration, and in any event is less than half of the spending Biden proposed on the campaign trail just on the Green New Deal. Combined with the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” bill Biden already signed (which was stuffed with completely unrelated-to-COVID-relief spending on progressive wish lists and interest-group payoffs, much of it not even scheduled to be spent in 2021), passage of the new package would bring the new spending introduced by Biden to $4.9 trillion, larger than the entire federal budget in 2019, which was $4.448 trillion. Biden’s new spending would be five times the size of the federal deficit in 2019, meaning that he is adding that much to taxes, the deficit, and/or the debt, to be paid for sooner or later by the rest of us. The 2020 defense budget was $738 billion; Biden would spend 6.6 times that, plus of course continuing to spend the defense budget as well as the whole rest of the previous budget.
One hopes that this will, if nothing else, put permanently to rest the bogus idea that Republicans’ chronic fiscal irresponsibility is anywhere in the same ballpark as Democrats’ terminal fiscal irresponsibility — a notion which itself ignores the fact that most of the budget deficit during Republican administrations is attributable to permanent spending passed into law during periods of unified Democratic control of government. Some of the spending here is a one-time thing; some is intended just to be the beginning of annual appropriations that Democrats will defend renewing every year long after all of us are dead.
If doubling the size of the federal government in a few months is not dramatic enough, it may be useful to consider exactly how much money $4.9 trillion really is. A lot of people, frankly, cannot hold in their heads the size of numbers that run into billions and trillions. P.J. O’Rourke used to talk about numbers with “vapor trails of zeroes” at the end. As Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen quipped back in the 1960s, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” So, let’s do some comparisons of how much money $4.9 trillion is.
According to the Census Bureau’s most recent estimates, the U.S. population is 329,484,123. $4.9 trillion is $14,871.73 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
The Census Bureau in 2019 estimated the number of U.S. households at 122,802,852. Using that as the denominator, when you combine the American Rescue Plan with the new proposals, Joe Biden would spend an additional $39,901.35 for every household in America. Who wants to pay just short of an extra $40,000 in additional federal taxes per household? Median household income in the United States was estimated pre-pandemic at $65,712, so if that was distributed evenly, the typical American household would need to cough up 61 percent of their income just to pay for new spending introduced by Joe Biden in 2021. In Mississippi, where the median income is $45,792, that rises to 87 percent.
Can the very rich just pay for this? Jeff Bezos’ net worth — not his income, his net worth, every penny the man has — is estimated at $180.6 billion. If you confiscated every last cent Bezos had to pay for this spending (which would require selling off or confiscating his controlling stake in Amazon), you’d still need to find 26 other guys as rich as Bezos to do that to. Except, there aren’t 26 other guys as rich as Jeff Bezos, and once you took all their money, you’d run out of guys that rich very quickly. Even if you confiscated all the assets of all of America’s billionaires, you’d still be short of $4.9 trillion, plus there’d be no billionaires left to pay taxes to support the other $4.48 trillion the government spends.
Pretty soon, we’re talking real money.