In pushing to pass the spending bill, Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress are doubling down on a strategy of ignoring voter problems in favor of irrelevant party priorities https://t.co/DN1AFKn7sH

— reason (@reason) November 30, 2021

Reason’s Peter Suderman writes, “One of the strangest ticks of left-leaning punditry over the last year has been the contention that if Democrats in Congress didn’t join together to pass some sort of climate and social spending bill—the various multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation packages that have gone under the label Build Back Better—then President Joe Biden would have presided over a failed presidency. The idea was that without this legislative package, Biden would have no accomplishments, no legacy, and nothing to show for his years in office with congressional majorities. Without the spending bill, Biden and the Democratic Party were doomed.

On the contrary, the evidence suggests that Biden is already presiding over a failed presidency—and passing the spending bill could further cement that failure.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Peter Suderman writes, “Democrats in Washington… have argued that their policies do not or should not have any costs whatsoever.

Just this week, for example, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded to a question about the tax impact of the $3.5 trillion spending plan now working its way through Congress by declaring that ‘there are some…who argue that in the past companies have passed on these costs to consumers…we feel that that’s unfair and absurd and the American people would not stand for that.’

Democrats have developed a habit of denying basic economics in order to promote their policies https://t.co/67vjNilQ24

— reason (@reason) September 29, 2021

When taxes are raised on corporations—the ‘companies’ in Psaki’s response—corporations often respond by passing that tax on to others. In some cases, they pass costs to consumers. In others, as the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome wryly notes on Twitter, they reduce the amount they would have otherwise spent on wages. They have to pay more to do business, and so they make adjustments accordingly. Costs create consequences and tradeoffs.

Empirical research has consistently shown that a large portion of corporate tax increases is actually paid by labor down the line. There are some reasonable academic debates about the precise percentage of the tax paid by labor, and how that might change under certain circumstances. But there is little real debate about whether or not some of the costs are passed on. The point is that it happens. Workers, not owners, pay at least some share of higher corporate taxes.

Yet Psaki’s position—the Biden White House’s position—is that this sort of thing is ‘absurd and unfair.”

Read the entire column.

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Reason’s Peter Suderman writes, “The CDC is supposed to be America’s frontline institution in the fight against infectious disease. Its job is to analyze viral threats, track their spread and development, and provide the public with relevant information about how to respond to outbreaks.

The CDC made the pandemic worse. https://t.co/aQml2DXWUA

— reason (@reason) September 23, 2021

Not only did the agency do this job poorly in the early stages of the pandemic, but it actively hindered efforts that would have greatly improved America’s response, and it made planning errors that were both predictable and avoidable. At nearly every stage of the pandemic, the CDC got things wrong and got in the way. Its failures almost certainly made America’s pandemic worse.”

Read the entire column.

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