Everyone needs to be deeply troubled by the current report that the Army is on tempo to overlook its recruiting purpose by dozens of 1000’s of troops and by the report that adopted a couple of days later, alleging that the Border Patrol is operating in need of brokers in Arizona and Texas. The border is so porous nowadays that even mayors of sanctuary cities are beginning to complain about unlawful immigration.
So, what’s Congress doing about these crises? They are going to spend tens of billions of {dollars} to extend the variety of … IRS workers. The plan requires spending some $80 billion to rent some 80,000 new brokers and investigators. This will give the IRS the assets to double the quantity of people that get audited yearly.
Is this about probably the most warped set of nationwide priorities you’ve ever heard? If this $80 billion had been rerouted to the Army and the Border Patrol, we might simply cease a lot of the tide of unlawful immigration and employees up our navy so we now have the troopers we have to defend our nation.
According to official funds numbers, the general price of border safety on the Department of Homeland Security is roughly $55 billion a 12 months. That is much less than simply the enhance in IRS funding to harass the general public. Or take into account this: The epidemic of opioid and different drug overdoses is killing near 100,000 a 12 months. We spend about $11 billion a 12 months to stop these tragic deaths. But the mockingly named Inflation Reduction Act requires 30 instances greater than this, or greater than $300 billion, to attempt to fight local weather change, whereas the variety of those that die from CO2 emissions annually is near zero.
All of that is to say that the Biden-Manchin-Schumer spending invoice that has now handed the Senate is arguably the best misallocation of our federal {dollars} in American historical past. It spends cash in areas the place we needs to be reducing bills and ignores nationwide safety priorities.
The motive we now have inflation is that the Biden administration has elevated spending by $3 trillion in 18 months. Almost everybody is aware of this. The central idiocy of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act is that as a substitute of reducing a half a trillion from the funds, this invoice does simply the alternative: It will increase spending by that quantity.
Incredibly, a invoice that supposedly reduces the funds deficit doesn’t lower one penny of precise spending from the federal funds. Even with federal audit experiences discovering greater than $250 billion of “erroneous” funds in Medicaid, meals stamps and unemployment insurance coverage, Congress does nothing to cut back the fraud and theft.
As the newest report on shortages of recruits in our armed forces tells us, we now have nationwide priorities that have to be met. This invoice bloats the funds, makes inflation worse and can add to our $30 trillion nationwide debt with out coping with any of the nation’s priorities.
It’s paying homage to the immortal line by Jeff Daniels to Jim Carrey in “Dumb and Dumber”: “Just when I think you couldn’t possibly be anything dumber …”
Stephen Moore is a syndicated columnist.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”