National Review Online
Friday, August 21, 2020
If you watched Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the other
big, headline speeches at the Democratic convention, you might be forgiven for
thinking that you had stepped into a meeting of old-time Democrats. There was
less woke, radical rhetoric than in the primaries, more invocations of
old-fashioned patriotic Americana, and more efforts to sound conservative
themes and reach out to small-businesspeople and churchgoers. What you might
have missed was the far-reaching agenda of the Biden–Harris Democrats.
Biden talked about “ending loopholes” and rolling back
Trump-era tax cuts. His actual proposal would raise $3.8 trillion in new
individual and business taxes and result in a tax hike, on average, for taxpayers
in every income quintile.
He spoke vaguely about climate and energy. He’s actually
proposing a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” in a “clean energy future,”
just as a first step. This is the “Green New Deal” in all but name, on top of a
vast expansion of health-care entitlement spending from a government-run
“public option” of the sort that was left out of Obamacare for being too far
left. Overall, Biden is proposing some $7 trillion in additional spending, most
of it permanent, which will eventually require even more enormous tax hikes
than the ones he has so far detailed.
The Democrats played down and euphemized their extremism
on abortion all the way to birth. Biden himself has shamefully abandoned four
decades of support for the Hyde amendment, and now backs taxpayer subsidies to
increase the number of abortions. The teachers’ unions, meanwhile, publicly
celebrated how the Biden–Sanders unity agenda would move education policy away
from both parental choice and accountability.
The Democratic Party platform pushes D.C. statehood,
entirely without regard to the fact that this cannot be done without amending
the Constitution, and more immigration law by executive fiat. The Democrats
pledge new gun bans in violation of the Second Amendment and are increasingly
threatening to eliminate the filibuster if enough Senate Republicans don’t roll
over for all of this.
That’s just what has been endorsed so far from the
official campaign and party organs. But nobody who has followed Biden or Harris
should have much faith in their spine for resisting their party’s never-ending
pull to the left. Republicans would do well to make the case that the upcoming
election is about what the Democrats would do with power. If Americans vote for
the Biden–Harris platform to find out what’s in it, there will be a lot of
unpleasant surprises.
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