EDITORIAL: The Biden budget: big government on steroids

Turns out the Biden spending blowout isn’t just a one-time extravaganza. Instead, the administration seeks to make it an annual occurrence.

On Thursday, news of President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2022 spending blueprint leaked out of Washington. The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House will propose a $6 trillion budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, rising steadily to $8.1 trillion within 10 years.

To put this in perspective, the U.S. government spent $2.7 trillion in fiscal 2006 and $3.268 trillion in fiscal 2016. Mr. Biden wants to essentially double federal outlays in just five years and then keep the printing presses running on auto in perpetuity.

The president’s first budget will “lay the foundation for his plans to modernize the nation’s infrastructure and expand the government’s role in providing health care, education and other social services, according to people familiar with the plans,” the Journal reported.

Modernizing the nation’s infrastructure is certainly a worthy goal. Unfortunately, as Mr. Biden’s pending $2 trillion infrastructure proposal neatly showcases, Democrats have twisted the term to mean anything and everything rather than the traditional roads, bridges, ports and the like. Meanwhile, advocating to “expand the government’s role” in virtually every aspect of modern life is an antidote for prosperity.

“The proposal shows the sweep of Mr. Biden’s ambitions to wield government power to help more Americans attain the comforts of middle-class life,” The New York Times glowingly assessed. As if creating more middle-class dependency paves the yellow-brick road to comfort and well-being. Former President Donald Trump may have exaggerated his ability to “drain the swamp,” but Mr. Biden harbors no such pretense, intending instead to preserve, enlarge and nourish it.

The Biden proposal pays little attention to controlling red ink. “Under the plan,” the Journal noted, “debt would exceed the record level seen at the end of World War II within a few years and reach 117 percent of economic output by the end of 2031, up from about 100 percent this year.”

There isn’t enough money on Earth to pay for all this, but the president proposes to soak the rich and ransack the corporations to offset as much as possible. After that, it all depends on how long the Treasury Department can keep churning out greenbacks that actually have value.

Republicans abandoned their commitment to fiscal sanity during the Trump years. But let’s hope the Biden budget proposal shocks them back to reality. How much longer can the nation play this game of fiscal chicken? After all, if something can’t continue forever, it won’t.