US President Joe Biden unveiled a new $7.3 trillion budget proposal for fiscal year 2025, including $5.5 trillion in tax hikes on corporations and high-income households. What’s wrong with the plan?
Biden’s 2025 budget proposal has been met with criticism by House Republicans who said the bill has zero chance of passing the lower chamber.
“The price tag of President Biden’s proposed budget is yet another glaring reminder of this Administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending,” a joint statement by House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Republican colleagues read, arguing that it would increase already-high inflation and a national debt that has topped $34.5 trillion.
“The budget on offer is ludicrous. Biden and his people know it. The Republicans in the House know it. This is a purely political document to try and shore up Biden’s failing numbers with his shrinking base,” Tom Luongo, financial and geopolitical analyst, told Sputnik.
“[Biden] is proposing the same punitive measures on the American people that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposes on anyone who takes a loan from them: to raise taxes, cut productivity, prioritize foreign bond holders,” the analyst added.
“To this package he’s adding more support for low-income voters struggling with inflation he created to buy them off in November,” Luongio said.
Democrats see the writing on the wall in recent opinion polls, according to Luongo. A FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls on March 11 showed 56 percent US respondents opposed of Biden’s policies, with just 38 percent approving.
It is clear that the Americans have grown weary of the president that “can only seem to spend money overseas while inviting the world in through an open border,” Luongo said.
Biden’s proposal to take money from the rich and spend it on more green initiatives — including allocating $8 billion to the American Climate Corps and $3 billion for the Green Climate Fund — does not meet the daily needs of ordinary Americans, he argued.
“It refuses to address the things that people actually want to change: jobs for American citizens, lower energy and food costs, less spending and less partisan politics,” Luongo stressed.
The analyst expects a fierce behind-the-scenes battle over Biden’s budget in the US Congress. Politically, however, the mood in the US has moved away from Biden’s plan, the commentator insisted.
“Giving people money isn’t going to solve the food and energy inflation problem, which is what is driving people away from Biden. That only makes the problem worse,” argued Luongo. “I see this entire budget proposal pretty much backfiring completely after what was a revelatory State of the Union address which even Biden supporters were hard-pressed to approve of.”
