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Opinion: Stop the spending party in D.C.

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Star Parker Founder & President, Center for Urban Renewal and Education
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Democrats are on a spending spree, throwing trillions of dollars at social programs that won’t really lift up the people they are trying to help. I wrote about the troubles of this strategy decades ago, and here we are again: funding programs that will keep people in poverty rather than put them on a path to independence.

At the same time, the Democrats’ massive $3.5 trillion plan will plunge America deeper into debt. We must push back against a proposal that will do way more harm than good.

Hi, I’m star Parker here to tell you there’s a major, big party going on here in Washington, DC, that you should be extremely concerned about. 

The $3.5 plus trillion spending spree that Democrats are rushing to pass will fundamentally transform our country into a massive welfare state. And we should really, really fight this back.

Look, as the author of a bestselling book, Uncle Sam’s Plantation, which I wrote in the nineties. I told ‘em how welfare programs of the thirties and sixties had trapped our nation’s poor into government dependency and unraveled the moral and economic fabric inside our nation’s most vulnerable zip codes. 

And now with this new massive so-called human infrastructure bill that progressives are trying to bully through the Congress, we will have expansions of the failures of LBJ’s Great Society War on Poverty. Like not, not even happened during that time, not even happened to our inner cities.

This will really enslave larger portions of Americans to “Uncle Sam’s plantation” and accumulate massive debts along the way to the so-called progressive totalitarianism or progressive utopian. I forgot they don’t call it totalitarianism. 

Listen, per the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards in 2001, the amount of federal debt per U.S. household was $30,684.  By 2011, this was up to $84,470 per U.S. household. And now it’s at $179,082 per U.S. household.

If the Democrats succeed with this massive plan, some are saying it’s $5 trillion. 

It’s a spending binge of other people’s money. But the federal debt that they leave behind per U.S. household by 2031, 10 years, will be up to $288,047. 

Also, of course, they’re going to need to finance it by more tax dollars. They’re going to have to borrow money from places like China to pay for this. That’s why they’re not telling anyone, how do you plan to pay for this?

We’ll get to that later. We all know the result will be higher taxes on corporations, higher taxes on capital gains. And this seems to be okay with these progressives in Congress. 

But you and I both know that when corporations have to pay more, then we have to pay more. We have to pay more in gas prices. We have to pay more in food prices. We have to pay more in goods and services that these companies provide.

The U S government is already $28 trillion in debt. Yet progressives here in Washington think taking more of your money to spend on its wasteful, redundant social programs is a good idea. 

It’s not even like we’re looking at essential expenditures. You can kind of give a little bit on the COVID spending, but this is not about our national well-being. Most of this spending in this particular bill is on building this socialist paradise that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders wants.  Nancy Pelosi… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants.

This is what they dream about: new household entitlements, new employer mandates, medicare benefits that expand all the way to the infant who putting at risk those that are on the system and have all kinds of new, massive corporate welfare subsidies in the name of green new deal. But, you know, let’s get to perhaps the most fundamental point of why we should oppose this. These Progressives — so-called political leaders — that pretend that they care about the poor are hurting the poor.  The last thing that America’s poor need is a slow down sluggish economy lard down by massive new big government. 

We’ve got to stop this, and we have time to stop this. You’re hearing about it on the news in passing: human infrastructure bill held up in the Congress, and it needs to be held up. It needs to be beat back. We have to stop it from becoming law. We need to let our members of Congress know right now that we cannot spend our way to economic growth. 

We cannot continue to put our entire country on welfare programs. We cannot continue to pay people not to work. We need to let the Congress know, and we need to let them know today that their spending party is over.

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