Tucker: Biden raises your taxes while he dodges his own
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' hosts slams politicians for creating nothing while taking Americans' money
If you watched Joe Biden sputter through his announcement of the administration’s $2 trillion "infrastructure plan," you may have been left with some questions. First, is this really about infrastructure? Bridges? Roads? Airports? Things we could actually use? Or is it yet another weird climate scheme/power grab/race-based redistribution plan? What exactly is this? And by the way, $2 trillion sounds like a lot for anything. Won’t that kind of spending cause hyperinflation? If you print money like it’s not worth anything, doesn’t the value of that money decline? Normal people may have had questions like that.
Thankfully The New York Times was on the scene to quell all doubt. The Times approached Biden’s plan with the calculated enthusiasm of Izvestia applauding yet another record Soviet potato harvest.
"Biden Plan Stresses Jobs, Roads, and Growth" read one of the Times' four separate front page headlines Thursday morning.
"$2 Trillion for 'Once in Generation' Fix of Infrastructure" read another. Ron Klain, the tech lobbyist-turned-White House chief of staff, was so grateful for the backup he tweeted out the front page himself.
What does the future look like that Ron Klain wants to win? Well, let’s be clear from the outset that this plan will not make your commute easier.
Only about 5% of that $2 trillion will actually go to roads and bridges. So, 5% on infrastructure, 95% on social engineering. That’s what Joe Biden calls a once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure bill. He’s right about part of it: It is once in a lifetime. If this passes, the next generation will life in a very different country.
Before we tell you what’s in the bill, a word about who will pay for it. In fact, we only need one word: You. Taxes are going up dramatically. They didn’t have to, actually. Tax revenues no longer fund the ambition of our political class. The Federal Reserve does. When politicians want something, they just print the money. It’s called Modern Monetary Theory. They’ve been doing this for years, and it’s accelerating. There’s no actual reason to raise taxes anymore, for anything. But Joe Biden wants to, just to punish you. And he plans to do that.
The administration is calling for a tax increase of about $3 trillion over ten years. That includes taxes on individual income and investments, as well as corporations. That would make this the first major tax hike in 28 years. But it's actually a much bigger tax increase than anything we saw under the Clinton administration. In 1993, taxes amounted to only around 0.5% of GDP. This plan would come to roughly three times that – about $300 billion a year, or 1.36% of GDP. You'd have to go back to 1968 to find a bigger tax increase. It’s a big deal.
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Have any questions? No questions allowed. Joe Biden doesn't want to answer questions. This is an emergency. And in emergencies, you do what you’re told.
JOE BIDEN: What I'm proposing [is] a one-time capital investment of roughly $2 trillion in America's future, spread largely over eight years ... Put simply, these are investments we have to make. We can afford to make them. To put it another way: We can't afford not to.
"We can't afford not to spend $2 trillion," says Joe Biden, like the used car salesmen he is at heart. Biden knows he won’t be paying a dime. People like Joe Biden avoid taxes. Joe Biden himself avoids taxes, in fact.
In 2017 and 2018, Joe Biden and his wife dodged payroll taxes on more than $13.3 million they earned through speaking fees and book royalties. How did they do that? The Wall Street Journal reported that the Bidens "classified the income as S-corporation profits rather than taxable wages." Surprised? Come on.
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You also shouldn't believe a word about how corporations are going to pay for this. We’d support it if that was the case. But they’re not. Corporate interests put Biden in the White House. They designed his policy, they sign off on every part of it, just like the credit card companies in Delaware once did. They’ll be fine. Corporations shelter most of their money from taxes by passing the costs along to workers (in the form of lower wages) and customers (in the form of higher prices). That's not a secret. Economists know that, and so does Joe Biden. None of this will hurt Amazon, that’s why Amazon is for it. Joe Biden isn’t interesting in getting into those details, like the math. He’d like you to know that this bill is going to turn America into a scene from "The Jetsons."
JOE BIDEN: Imagine what we can do, what's within our reach when we modernize those highways. You and your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas on board a high-speed train and connect high-speed, affordable, reliable internet wherever you live. Imagine knowing that you're handing your children and grandchildren a country that will lead the world in producing clean energy technology. And we'll address one of the biggest threats of our time. That's what we'll do.
Flying cars? Teleport machines? Sadly not. We're going to "modernize those highways." Quite honestly, a lot of them could use it. But what does modernizing highways mean exactly? A piece in The Washington Post gives us some idea.
According to the Post, an activist by the name of Amy Stelly has been demanding the removal -- not the building, the removal -- of a highway that cuts through her neighborhood in the city of New Orleans. She thinks the highway, known as the Claiborne Expressway, is bad. It’s an eyesore and contributes to pollution.
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For years, she's demanded local leaders get rid of it. But they refused. People use it. It’s an important stretch of road. But now the White House, and Joe Biden's infrastructure plan, have decided that highway is an example of "historic inequity" that can be solved by "billions in new spending." In other words, it’s a racist highway, and we’ve got to pay to tear it down.
Amy Stelly was enthused by this. "I'm floored," she said. "I’m thrilled to hear President Biden would call out the Claiborne Expressway as a racist highway." Presumably, the highway is sexist, transphobic and dog whistles for White supremacy, not to mention QAnon insurrections. Gotta tear it down.
Expect a lot more highways to meet this fate. People who believe highways are racist will get tens of billions of dollars as part of this plan, as long as they're in what the Biden administration calls "underserved communities." The entirety of this "infrastructure plan" is more like a mashup of intersectional theory from Weslyan and some kind of South Africa-style racial spoils system. We saw a taste of that earlier in the year, when Joe Biden sent billions of dollars to African-American farmers in this country purely because of how they looked. Now, that’s illegal, immoral and completely divisive, but it’s just the beginning.
In his infrastructure bill, Joe Biden calls for sending $25 billion to "historically [B]lack universities" and other "minority-serving institutions for research and development." You may think it’s a good idea (and you should have to explain why), but it’s not infrastructure.
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He also wants to "eliminate exclusionary zoning" and "needless barriers to producing affordable housing." So your neighborhoods may have to make way for "multi-family dwellings." You don’t want multi-family dwellings in your neighborhood? Doesn’t matter. It’s equity. Shut up, racist. And there’s more where’re that came from.
Joe Biden also wants $100 billion for workplace development to, "reduce racial inequities in job training and hiring." Huh? That doesn’t sound like eliminating racial discrimination in hiring, it sounds like mandating it.
"Wait a minute," you might be wondering. "What does hiring people with certain skin colors have to do with infrastructure? Sorry to keep bringing us back to the point, but the point was supposed to be infrastructure."
It’s not, really. And Democrats aren’t really pretending it is anymore. Democrats are in charge, this is their chance to take total control of the economy, and they're going to use it.
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REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN, D-N.Y.: We understand that to save our democracy and to evolve into the multi-racial democracy that we are, we have to take a holistic approach. So we spoke about infrastructure in alignment with a Green New Deal, ending our dependence on fossil fuels within the next 10 years. We spoke about education and fully funding our public schools and canceling student debt. We spoke about repealing the Hyde Amendment, a federal jobs guarantee, we spoke about a variety of issues in alignment with progressive priorities the people of this country are demanding.
This is why you don't want the "theory" people in charge of anything. Sleazeball politicians of old would make the case: "Vote for me and I’ll fix the potholes." They may have stolen some of the money you sent them, but in the end, they had to fix the potholes. They promised they would, and your commute got a little better.
These people are not about fixing the potholes. It's about "saving our democracy" and evolving into a "multi-racial democracy," as if we don't have that already. It's also about something called the "Green New Deal." And it's not simply one deranged theory-addled member of Congress admitting it.
According to Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, former Mayor of South Bend, Rhodes Scholar and McKinsey consultant, we need this infrastructure bill to end hurricanes.
PETE BUTTIGIEG, MARCH 25: In the United States, transportation is the leading contributor to climate change, contributing to a pattern of extreme weather events, which takes a severe toll on our infrastructure. Every dollar we spend rebuilding from a climate-driven disaster is a dollar we could have spent building a more competitive, modern, and resilient transportation system that produces significantly lower emissions.
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So according to climatologist Pete ... Hold on, we thought he was a McKinsey consultant? No, he’s a climate expert. Not even the climate experts understand the climate, that’s how complex it is, but Pete Buttigieg does, and he’s telling you it’s the roads that are causing hurricanes. We never had hurricanes before roads. He’s going to fix that. That explains why there's $46 billion in the bill for the federal government to buy electric vehicles. Now, FBI agents can arrest you for sedition while driving Teslas.
"But, wait a second," you ask. "Aren’t those Teslas powered by electricity made in part by coal plants?" Yeah, whatever. Shut up, insurrectionist.
Another $2 trillion goes to tax credits for "clean energy generation and storage." I wonder who owns those firms. Could they be Biden donors? I think so.
There's a plan for building 500,000 electric vehicle chargers, an allocation of $174 billion to expand the market of electric vehicles – no one wants to buy them, but the government is going to make you want to buy them – and another $10 billion for a "Climate Conservation Corps" to "boost climate resilience." Are they going to buy umbrellas? That would be a useful form of climate resilience. But they’re thinking bigger than that. This is about transforming our democracy.
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You’ll notice that none of the spending goes towards aiding the oil workers put out of business when Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. They can learn to code.
According to the people who are really running the Democratic Party, though, none of this goes far enough. We’ve humiliated the Keystone XL workers and spent $2 trillion, but we need to go further.
According to Sandy Cortez, pampered sciion of Westchester, we need to spend a lot more money or else you’re racist.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, D-N.Y., MARCH 31: I have real concerns that $2.2 trillion isn’t actually going to get us there. So we’re going to have to make deeper investments ... We are in a devastating economic moment. Millions of people in the United States are unemployed. We have a truly crippled health care system and a planetary crisis on our hands and we’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. So we can do $10 trillion.
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Another math lecture from Sandy. She doesn’t care, by the way. None of them care about the consequences of this. What are the consequences of this, exactly? What happens if all this money gets into the system? Could it affect your life?
Take a look at a chart of commodity prices, and that will give you one sense.
The government injected trillions of dollars into the economy, and what happened? The cost of almost every durable good, the things you need to live with, went way up. The price of lumber jumped more than 250%. Crude oil jumped 188%. Sugar, 50%. Copper and tin went up by more than 80% each, and so on. It became a lot more expensive to live here. That’s fine if you’re Joe Biden or Sandy Cortez. Not fine if you’re you.
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The cost to buy a home jumped by 11%. According to the United Nations Food Price index, the cost of food has just reached its highest level in seven years.
In other words, just by spending a lot of money they didn’t make, the people in charge are making it for much harder for most Americans to live here. That’s the cost of inflation. It’s a tax, and it’s insidious, and it’s impossible to control once it starts. Meanwhile, the most powerful people in the country have never been happier. The cost of apartments in San Francisco has gone way down. The Dow Jones is up by 50%.
Private equity is booming. Cryptocurrency investors are also seeing huge returns. Some of them have so much money they’re making up things to buy. They're investing in things called "non-fungible tokens," or NFTs -- which are literally useless digital tokens. The Nyan Cat meme just sold for $590,000 in "NFT format." Now, it’s not the art that was sold. It’s the useless digital token. This is the tulip craze if there ever was one.
Those are the people who benefit from another $2 trillion in spending. And by the way, the tax increases won't offset all this spending. Joe Biden plans to tax what economists call "savers," which don't bounce around as much in the economy. Taxing savers isn't an effective way to curb inflation, because the money isn't affecting as many transactions. It’s punitive.
But the party in charge isn't concerned about inflation. They don't care if it's harder for you to get gas or buy dinner. They're just upset you feel so entitled to drive your vehicle to work on their roads.
REP. EMANUEL CLEAVER, D-MO, ON "YOUR WORLD" MARCH 31: I do think that, given the preference, I, and probably many others, would like to see the gasoline tax raised. As you know, that has been talked about for decades. And unfortunately, Americans have become so accustomed to the low gas prices, and even though I would challenge anybody if they leave wherever they are right now, looking at this — at your show, to go out and ask ten people how much they pay in federal gasoline taxes, they can’t tell you. They won’t be able to tell you until a number’s put out there, when somebody says we’re going to raise the taxes in order to pay our infrastructure costs, or the re-building of our infrastructure, and then, all of a sudden, somebody will start waging a war.
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So the real problem with America is gas prices are too low. So people who don’t live in cities, people who drive for a living, just aren’t paying enough. That’s the problem, and those ungrateful Americans don’t even know it.
What’s going on here? Trillions of dollars changing hands. This is looting. Just as their supporters did in Minneapolis last summer, the Biden people are looting the country. They’ve done nothing to build America. Susan Rice, Barack Obama, Ron Klain, and the rest of the people making these decisions haven’t created a single thing. They’re not creators. They’re takers, and they’ve gotten rich doing it. How much did Susan Rice make in the last few years, and how did she make that money? They’re just stripping the corpse. And when it falls apart, they’ll be gone. In the meantime, welcome to hyperinflation.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 1, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight"
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