The president failed to pass Build Back Better, but he still spent plenty.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised $11 trillion in new spending increases over the next decade, dwarfing the $1 trillion to $2 trillion in new spending promised by previous Democratic presidential nominees Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Kerry. Many doubted that a Biden administration would really seek such a bold and historic expansion of government, given Biden’s more moderate, cautious, return-to-normalcy campaign themes, the election becoming a referendum on Donald Trump rather than economic policy, and his party’s miniscule congressional majority.
No one is doubting Joe Biden’s spending ambitions anymore.
In a dizzying first year in the White House, President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion “stimulus” package and a $550 billion infrastructure bill, and he persuaded Congress to pass a budget resolution setting the stage for $1 trillion in additional discretionary spending over the decade. Yet the president also failed to pass $4.5 trillion more spending in the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, much of which became the ill-fated Build Back Better plan.
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Dispatch