Financial Expert Denounces Biden’s Claimed Deficit-Reducing Budget as ‘Empty Sloganeering’
20:19 GMT 09.03.2023 (Updated: 12:45 GMT 13.04.2023)
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The White House delivered to Congress on Thursday its $6.9 trillion proposal for a fiscal year 2024 budget. The budget includes spending for numerous new health, education, and other social service initiatives, but also an increased defense budget of $842 billion and another $6 billion in aid for Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden has claimed the budget, which includes new taxes on wealthy Americans and big corporations, will close the budget deficit by $2 trillion over the next decade.
“In my view, the Biden Administration gives only lip service to the needs of the American people,” financial and political commentator Tom Luongo told Sputnik on Thursday. “They are wholly focused on being the leaders of a global community. They openly despise America and this budget betrays that position at its core.”
“So, while many will be right in saying that [US President Joe] Biden is playing to a Democrat voter base who hate anyone richer than they are, this budget goes much further than that in what it says about this administration’s priorities,” Luongo asserted.
“These people never met a wealth-generating activity they didn’t despise and want to tax harder.”
Luongo explained that “‘Eating the rich’, soaking them for taxes of the type and kind which interrupt the capital formation cycle, are wholly at odds with real economic growth. Any kind of ‘wealth tax’ is a thinly-veiled move to nationalize private companies through forced sales to pay for unrealized capital gains on investments.”
“The biggest tell about this administration’s priorities is their obsession with raising corporate income taxes to bring them to ‘international standards.’ One of the hallmarks of the Trump tax cuts was bringing the US corporate rate down below the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] average. And, Biden, rather than building on that to pressure the rest of the world to do the same, is bowing to international pressure, especially from their supposed satraps in the EU, to raise those rates to ‘level the playing field.’”
Luongo told Sputnik he agrees with the assessment of US Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who said Biden’s budget brings the United States closer to a “fiscal crisis.”
“Corporate income tax is a passthrough tax to the consumer, period. It always is. If any of this ‘tax the rich’ stuff worked like they’ve been preaching for 60+ years, poverty would have ended when I was a child in the 1970s,” Luongo asserted.
“The path to a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility is spending less money, not spending more ‘better,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. It’s all empty sloganeering to advance the further takeover of the productive capacity of the US (and other nations who pursue the same policy, i.e. the EU) by the central government,” he continued.
“The right path to building real, sustainable wealth is through thrift, industry and providing a stable savings and investment environment, not the politics of envy, which is literally all you hear from these people. This budget is a non-starter given the circumstances.”
Turning to the proposed Pentagon budget, which is $26 billion more than the present year’s allotment, Luongo noted the DoD doesn’t actually spend that money on defense - “it spends that much money on security for a very select group of people who sit at the top of the wealth pyramid.”
“That’s what those hundreds of bases overseas represent,” he said. “Close them, pull out of those places, engage in serious diplomacy - which seems beyond the comprehension no less capability of the Biden administration - and the defense budget could be slashed by 20% and that remaining money spent ‘better’ to defend America itself, not America’s elites’ imperial ambitions.”
“It is a tremendous waste of time, money, and most importantly the human capital of the US to the detriment of the American people as well as the victims of this government’s hubristic policy,” Luongo said.
