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Biden is sticking to an agenda of high taxes, runaway spending, and crushing regulation that stifles the U.S. economy, ultimately weakening Washington in the face of Beijing. He made that clear in the 2023 budget. Adding that to the policy of cheap money and more issuance that the Fed has sustained and we get the worst inflation in 40 years. All amid the effects of ineffective and costly confinements: mainly the dangerous uncoordinated dynamic capital structure misnamed “supply chain crisis.”
The White House intends to solve ills caused by excessive government spending, over-regulation, discretionary subsidies, high taxes and rising inflation with more spending, more regulation, higher taxes, more discretionary subsidies and more inflation.
In an energy crisis Biden upholds regulations that destroyed America’s energy independence. He halts domestic oil and gas production while squandering billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing wind and solar energy production and risking grid reliability.
As journalist and political analyst Diane Katz explained Biden’s regulatory agenda this year in the Washington Times:
“… it includes 2,678 ‘active’ actions, which exceeds the Trump administration’s second-year agenda by 35% (…). Some 200 of the regulations are designated as ‘economically significant’ which are the type of regulations that would cause ‘an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more.'”
Katz also rightly pointed out that none of the 450 federal regulatory agencies track the costs of their regulations and those independent estimates agree that those regulatory costs for the private sector exceed $2 billion dollars; that just to comply with bureaucratic procedures companies spend no less than 10,600 million hours per year and that regulation now costs taxpayers almost $80 billion dollars a year, compared to $25 billion dollars in 2000. I will add that this is precisely why former President Donald Trump’s deregulation was an efficient and swift stimulus to investment, which recovered investments and industrial jobs lost due to the previous over-regulation that Biden is now taking up again and increasing exponentially.
But the White House does intend to remove restrictions on fiduciaries of employee pension plans that would prevent them from sacrificing returns on those investments for social policy objectives, sacrificing those pensions on the altar of woke ideology.
The Code of Federal Regulations has increased in volume by 35% since 2000 and now stands at 185,984 pages. The Biden administration has swiftly repealed all regulatory restrictions instituted by the Trump administration. Among the 44 Trump executive orders hastily rescinded by Biden was one that included a directive to eliminate at least two prior regulations for every new regulation issued.
As Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) pointed out on March 23, the correct path would be the opposite because goals such as reducing the cost of creating new jobs, forming businesses and even starting new families would be achieved by reducing the tax burden and eliminating destructive regulations, while the larger goal of reducing consumer prices would be achieved:
“Repealing crony policies such as the war on domestic fossil fuels, electric vehicle subsidies, the federal sugar subsidy program, giveaways to big labor bosses through the Davis-Bacon Act, onerous shipping regulations and import taxes.”
So, Roberts and Paul concluded that lowering inflation would also require preventing the recurrent deficit spending of programs like “Build Back Better” from being financed by “printing money.”
I believe that a correction of that scope is already a matter of national security for the United States and of survival for the free world, because among the consequences of Biden’s regulatory deluge stand out the geopolitical ones (which boil down to the fact that without a strong) flexible and innovative economy Washington will not be able to confront Beijing to contain its growing geopolitical influence.
For now, Democrats insist on raising energy costs, suppressing jobs with crony assistance payments, and stifling competitiveness under a regulatory deluge that includes suspect subsidies to large corporations handpicked by regulators.
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros