Di Leo: Sometimes, the Price Tag is Just a Distraction

By John F. Di Leo - 

Let’s say it would cost $5.5 trillion dollars to wipe out your city by planting landmines under all the streets and sidewalks.

Another proposal on the table is to wipe out the city by buying old poison gas on the dark web, and planting it in public buildings and public places when crowds are expected; this proposal only costs $3.5 trillion.

A third proposal, only just recently promulgated, would involve the hiring of foreign mercenaries to shoot up the place; they work cheap, by comparison, and the bill is expected to only range between $1.5 and $1.75 trillion to wipe out the town this way.

I won’t bother to ask you which of the three is the most responsible choice, because, Gentle Reader, you know that the price tag isn’t the main issue here; the real issue is the end game, the horrible goal of wiping out the town.  The method, the price tag, even the perpetrators don’t matter; the very goal is domestic terrorism, and it must be opposed.  At any cost, without compromise.  We must stop this effort.

Some will say that I’ve chosen a poor analogy here, that the administration’s willingness to come down from $5.5 trillion to “just” $1.5 trillion is a wonderful accomplishment, a helpful proof that We the People are finally getting through to them, and that we have finally made the point that Washington DC’s profligate ways must be curtailed.

Don’t be so sure.

Ever since America’s Founding Era, we have – often rightly – focused on price tags when discussing federal (and other governmental) projects.  Every annual budget is all about the money: to raise this department’s budget a lot, we have to only raise that department’s budget a little.  To increase military pay, we must either cut the rate of growth somewhere else or give up some programs that are important to another constituency.  To fight this war, we need to give up that project.

Economic growth will always guarantee more revenue, even at flat tax rates; but we always manage to outspend that natural growth.

So every proposal is viewed in terms of how much it costs, and our “inner accountants” are happy whenever we can get a reduction out of the enemy. 

But is that really the right way to look at public policy?

A strong case can be made, in fact, that our focus on spending has been an error for at least a century now.  We don’t evaluate and fight over new proposals on their merits and faults; rather, we put them in budget bills, and fight over their price tags.  As we see from the analogy above, when you talk about massive sums of money, the price tags do take over the conversation.  Huge sums just do that; maybe it’s psychological.

So we must force ourselves to consider a question:  Why is the Biden-Harris regime so happy to consider a huge reduction from their alleged $3.5 trillion “spending” bill?  This is a bill that independent analysts have determined would actually cost a minimum of $5.5 trillion over its first ten years alone… and yet, the Biden-Harris regime is so desperate to get it passed that they have happily agreed to cut their demands by more than half, in sheer spending alone.

This can only mean one thing: the important parts of this bill – that is, the parts that are most important to them – are the parts that don’t have a price tag associated with them.

The Biden-Harris regime wanted 87,000 new IRS agents, and the right to get full visibility into every American’s bank statements.  The first demand requires 87,000 civil servant employees, their salaries and benefits, plus office space and expense accounts for them all.  The latter has no cost whatsoever; the banks already gather data in our monthly statements, making this confidential information free for the IRS or other agencies to grab is free; it’s just access.    If they give up the former, they cut their financial request, but the biggest potential for tyranny is in the latter, isn’t it?

The Biden-Harris regime wants to give citizenship to millions of illegal aliens, a plan that has a real cost, in terms of making these millions eligible for federal, state, and local welfare benefits. A costly plan. But if they just get the legal right to disregard the border, then those millions of people will continue to pour in over our porous borders, flooding our cities, towns and countryside, creating a need that will drive up those costs after the fact, whether we allocate the money in this bill or not.   The greater potential for national bankruptcy may appear to be in the first part, but it’s the legalization of open borders policies that do the most damage to our body politic.

The Biden-Harris regime wants to expand Medicare, and drive millions more Americans out of private healthplans and into the obamcare network.  They also want to encourage elective operations, from sex reassignment at ever-earlier ages to abortion-on-demand.  Whether we fund their specific requests or not, it’s the policies that transform the medical profession to serve as an enabler of mental illness or even filicide that truly represent the worst of their desired goals.

When we look for analogies in public policy, we on the Right are always hesitant, for fear of going too far, for fear of being accused of hyperbole.

But the Build Back Better program is, truly, a form of domestic terrorism.  It is designed to weaken American industry, making us more dependent on China for everything from manufactured goods to energy.  It is designed to weaken the American culture, by watering down our society with ever more newcomers who don’t have time to assimilate and learn what it was that made the American Founding so special.  This agenda is designed to reward the irresponsible blue states at the expense of the responsible red states.  It is a thoroughly partisan bill, from beginning to end, regardless of the price tags of each individual line item.

And it is for this reason that we must stop caring about the price tags – of this bill and of any bill – and instead to focus, first and foremost, on the subject matter of each proposal.

Build Back Better is about making America even more dependent on foreign goods… putting America even more at risk of invasion from without and destruction from within… crushing small businesses so that all workers can be forced to work for the multinational corporations that are so much easier for a tyrannical government to control.. and bankrupting our cities and states so they become utterly dependent on the largesse of the federal capital city, the one place that can just print money whenever it wants.

Should the Build Back Better bill be defeated?  Of course.  Because it’s not about the difference between $3.5 trillion and $1.75 trillion.  It’s about the difference between freedom and statism.

Copyright 2021 John F Di Leo

John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based transportation professional and trade compliance trainer.  A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, his semi-fictional books on vote fraud and current events are available on Amazon.  He has regularly written for Illinois Review since 2009.

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