WASHINGTON—The Senate voted today to advance the behemoth infrastructure bill debated for weeks by Congress. The proposal is a Trojan horse that will pave the way for a far larger, more radical budget reconciliation plan, and its supporters on the left are not even attempting to hide their agenda in ramming it through. Heritage Policy Analyst David Ditch released the following statement Tuesday on both radical plans:
“Make no mistake, final passage of this proposal is a necessary first step for approval of Democrats’ radical $3.5 trillion-behemoth budget reconciliation package waiting on deck. Republican support for the ‘infrastructure’ deal will enable the biggest tax-and-spend legislation in history.
“The ‘infrastructure’ plan barely spends any funds on actual infrastructure. It embeds left-wing ideology in the Department of Transportation. It breaks from the bipartisan understanding that infrastructure costs should be covered by the people who use it. Worse, this deal will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt, which is already $220,000 per household.
“The $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation monstrosity that will follow infrastructure will likely include amnesty for illegal immigrants, a massive expansion of the welfare state, job-killing tax hikes, and a Green New Deal 2.0. It will bring the 2021 spending spree to a whopping $6.5 trillion. That amounts to over $50,000 for every household in the country and is more than the cost of World War II and Obamacare combined after adjusting for inflation. These radical spending plans will only push inflation higher and mock the concerns Americans have about out-of-control spending.”
Ditch emphasizes that the result of this spending would be more centralized power and control for legislators and bureaucrats in Washington. It would create a cradle-to-grave welfare state that is antithetical to the principles America was founded on and will result in higher taxes, slower growth and potentially disastrous inflation. This reckless spending spree will move America further from the principles that have made it the greatest nation in the history of the world. Congress must reverse course and recover its fiscal sanity as soon as possible.
