Biden Raises Taxes for Americans, Raises Pay for Bureaucrats

Daniel Greenfield March 13, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

“I want to make it clear, I’m gonna raise some taxes,” Biden threatened Americans last week.

While Biden claimed that the taxes were targeted at the “billionaires out there”, the proposed tax hikes in his new budget are going to hit millions of Americans, not just the 700 or so billionaires.

During the election, Biden had already warned those who favored Trump’s tax cuts, “If you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut.” At least that’s one promise he’s keeping.

After insane spending sprees, Biden claims that tax cuts are needed to cut the deficit and save Medicare. Meanwhile he’s proposing to give government bureaucrats their biggest raise since the Carter administration.

From the Inflation Increase Act, which massively boosted the size of the IRS, which is now pursuing waiters for their tips and targeting people who sell used clothes on eBay, the Biden administration has focused on building up the federal bureaucracy at the expense of Americans.

Biden’s budget calls for a 5.2% raise for federal employees, the biggest pay hike in 43 years, ever since his inflationary predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who became a one-term president in part for prioritizing the federal bureaucracy over the misery being suffered by American families.

The administration had already dispensed a federal pay raise of 4.4% to 5.2% last year, the highest in over 20 years, now it’s trying to match the legacy of the Carter administration.

In 2017, Trump had kept the pay increase down to 1.9% while federal unions had demanded 3.2%. Now Biden is offering a 5.2% pay hike while the unions are demanding 8.7%.

Average federal wages are already at almost $100,000 and will pass that with Biden’s raise. That’s much higher than the average private sector salary. With average total compensation, those numbers shoot up stratospherically to $143,643 for federal employees.

Biden’s historic pay hike comes as many federal workers aren’t even working. House Republicans passed the SHOW UP Act last month requiring them to come to work. Nearly every House Democrat voted against it and Senate Democrats have refused to even consider the bill.

Instead, the Biden administration has made it easier for the feds to do or not do Zoom work.

Over two thirds of federal workers were doing some remote work last year. During the pandemic those numbers were as high as 90% for the most useless parts of the government like the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, the EPA, HHS, HUD and USAID.

25% of Department of Health and Human Services personnel didn’t even bother logging in. One report found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working”. Sure, give them the biggest pay hike in 43 years while Americans can’t feed their families. And then raise taxes on Americans.

The recent inflationary Democrat spending packages have resulted in a federal hiring frenzy not only at the IRS, but across the board. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act led to a job boom, not for Americans, but for government bureaucrats. The jobs aren’t being added at small businesses, as Biden, the Democrats and their media falsely claimed, but in the government.

Last February, the Office of Personnel Management excitedly announced that it would need to hire 4,000 employees to carry out the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“These are exciting jobs, and they are critically important,” OPM director Kiran Ahuja gushed.

Critically important to bankrupting America.

And all of that requires more money, more tax hikes and less available funds to help Americans.

“We should be putting American taxpayers first, not the federal bureaucracy,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer argued.

Instead, Biden is putting bureaucrats first and Americans last with pay hikes for government employees and tax hikes for Americans. Biden keeps pushing the same claims that he’s “making the wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share.” He blusters that he’s trying to protect Medicare. If he really cared about Medicare, he’d change his spending priorities like keeping Social Security and Medicare funds viable instead of paying off government unions.

Instead, Biden has directed trillions to his donors, supporters and base. Now he promises that he can keep Medicare going until 2050 if he gets his tax hikes. That’s a lie. America is expected to add $19 trillion to its national debt in the next decade. The estimated interest rate on the debt will climb to $640 billion this year. Biden’s budget proposals have clocked in at around $6 trillion before. Even as the Fed hikes interest rates, government spending keeps feeding inflation. As a result, American families can’t afford food, but the economy still continues to overheat.

Biden’s student loan bailout has an estimated cost as high as $400 billion. Medicare Part A spending is expected to have a $3 billion shortfall this year with an end-of-year negative trust fund balance of $8.6 billion in 2028 by the time Biden would finish a hypothetical second term.

The trouble is that Biden is prioritizing lesbian studies postgrads and equity administrators in the federal bureaucracy over grandma’s surgery. There’s plenty of money to eliminate the student loans of Harvard grads and to raise the salaries of federal bureaucrats, but tax hikes are needed to “save” Medicare.

The size of the federal civilian workforce has gone up from 2.08 million in 2018 to 2.14 million in 2021. One estimate noted that, “federal workers receive pay that is 17 percent higher than private sector employees on average performing comparable work. That is on top of putting in 12 percent fewer hours” with retirement health benefits kicking in at 57 years old.

In 2016, an Open the Books report showed that the federal government had spent $136 billion paying federal employees or over half a billion dollars a day and $1 million a minute. Those numbers are much higher now. The only pathway to salvaging Medicare and Social Security is to cut the cost of government. No amount of tax hikes will compensate for government spending whose debt-to-GDP ratio hit 97%. The federal government is running out of “other people’s money”. And that money is vanishing to fund a massive edifice that is bankrupting America.

The choice is simple: cut government or kill seniors. Biden has chosen to build up the government employees that fund his campaign and make up his party.

That means he’s chosen to kill seniors while trying to use them to push more tax hikes.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.