Like a poisoned Pez dispenser, the Democrat-pushed $3.5 trillion “budget” keeps offering bits of disaster to those who open it.
Not only have proponents of the bill praised its cozy, fascist subsidy-of-favored-press-through-the-IRS plan, and not only do these boosters want to expand the IRS and shower nearly $79 billion on it over the next 10 years, the “budget” incorporates huge portions of “Green New Deal” collectivism into its saga-length text.
The Daily Signal’s David Ditch offers a host of these absurd proposals to reveal how advocates for the leviathan add insult to the clear injury of unconstitutional handouts.
The first we’ll highlight really is a two-fer, both under the milquetoast moniker “equity” that leftists love to use in order to hide collectivism, invasion of rights, and redistribution of wealth. It’s “Tree Equity and Charging Equity”:
Section 11003 would use $3 billion to ‘increase community tree canopy,’ which is a legalistic way of saying they want rural and suburban areas to pay for planting trees in cities.
Section 30443 would dedicate $1 billion for ‘electric vehicle charging equity…’
And Fox Business’s Rémy Numa observes that the “electric charging equity program, "comes with a $1 billion price tag,” while:
The bill generally doesn’t elaborate on the meaning of equity in this context, though American Forests defines ‘tree equity,’ for example, as a tree-planting program that ‘identifies the cities that can gain the most significant health, economic and climate benefits by increasing tree canopy in places of high need.’
Which is a glorious new wrinkle on the ugly face of central-planning that, by Jove, the Founders obviously designed the U.S. government to do, right?
Moving on.
The Daily Signal’s Ditch tells us about the glorious $10 billion for ‘Environmental Justice’ college programs:
Colleges and universities across the country are already awash in ‘ethnic studies’ programs that primarily serve as a factory for producing left-wing activists.
Section 136601 of the spending bill would spend $10 billion on creating something similar for the environmentalist movement, calling for funding “environmental justice” programs in higher education.
It sure is interesting to see how collectivists have subverted the concept of “justice” to mean its precise opposite. Where “justice” used to mean the recognition of universal Natural Rights to life, to liberty, and to the peaceful acquisition and disposition of property, the term now means collectivist seizure and redistribution of property/wealth. This subversion has run in tandem with the leftist subversion of the term “right,” which originally meant mutual respect and hands-off others and their property.
As with George Orwell’s NewSpeak, the language has been destroyed by the political players so that, just like “1984” saw Big Brother call freedom “slavery,” so, too, now, theft is “justice.”
Ditch offers this as an added “Green New Deal” gem hidden in the budget, $8.1 billion for Environmentalist “Climate Corps”:
Pages 7, 19, 925, and 965 would dedicate $8.1 billion toward paying environmentally minded people to work at federal parks and forests, along with Native American areas, on a broadly defined set of projects.
This would, of course, be layered on top of billions of dollars of programs for federal lands and forests elsewhere in the bill, and on top of tens of billions in regular spending every year.
For some reason, all those years I’ve spent trying to tell people that most of the federal government is wildly unconstitutional return to me in a flash. How odd.
Continuing, we have the federal subsidization of electric vehicle manufacturers and the electric infrastructure parasites they already are promising cash – from the state to the corporate level:
The ‘Green Energy’ subtitle, starting on page 1695, would throw $279 billion in tax subsidies at a range of predictable things: unreliable wind and solar energy projects, cost-ineffective biofuels like ethanol, and an “environmental justice” bonus depending on where things are built.
The most galling aspect of this massive exercise in corporate welfare and economic micromanagement is Section 136401, which provides tax credits toward the purchase of electric vehicles.
While much of the rhetoric surrounding the bill revolves around socialist notions of “economic justice,” the details in this section show that Democrats have no problem cutting checks to the wealthy. Existing tax credits for these vehicles go overwhelmingly to households making over $100,000 per year.
And what “Green New Deal” budget would be complete without a $5 billion ‘Environmental and Climate Justice’ slush fund?
Writes Ditch:
Section 30204 would create a $5 billion slush fund for the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue left-wing goals. On top of the $5 billion, the agency would receive $500 million to pay bureaucrats to run the program. The goals, which repeatedly reference ‘disadvantaged communities,’ are nebulous enough that the bureaucrats will have nearly free rein to use the billions as they see fit.
The bill also contains provisions to spend cash on fish “conservation” – which the free market can do if property rights are allowed -- and bee pollination, which, researchers have shown, already is being done to save bees because those who earn livings from bees have financial incentives to care for them.
And it transfers taxpayer cash from this and future generations to be handed to, not just moms, but gender-LARPing people pretending to be mothers.
Observes Ditch:
Yet another example of the spending bill bowing to radical activists comes in Section 31046.
At first glance it is one of many provisions promoting the Green New Deal agenda, in this case throwing $85 million at research seeking to identify whether climate affects pregnancy. Note that this is not an attempt to remedy problems that are known to exist, but rather an attempt to find problems that would then generate more support for the agenda.
The section proceeds to go off the deep end with its choice of words: ‘pregnant, lactating, and postpartum individuals.’ Erasing women from the context of pregnancy and motherhood is a promotion of the most extreme elements of the transgender movement and has no business becoming part of federal law.
And who’s to say that a “pregnant individual” is an “individual” nowadays? That single, solitary, person might identify as “plural” as “multitudinous and vast.”
Which are terms to describe the insults of this budget.
But what should one expect from politicians who don’t care about their oaths to the Constitution, a supposed set of rules that doesn’t allow this kind of nonsense? Just as it was with Franklin Roosevelt’s obnoxious “New Deal” – which stole oodles of cash from people who could have used it in the productive market, then spent it on such insane make-work ideas as paying people to float balloons down city streets and to destroy crops – this “Green New Deal” is an utter insult to ethics, morals, the U.S. Constitution, and economics.
It is a fluff-packaged, NewSpeak-laden, Climate Cultist act of criminality, and the faster Americans recognize it as such, the better.
Related: Sen. Ed Markey at Green New Deal Rally: 'Give Us Some of That Socialism' | MRCTV