What Biden’s Dead-on-Arrival Budget Reveals
America’s fiscal machinery is broken, and the administration still hasn’t shown any real interest in fixing it.
Come on, man.
Photographer: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg
If you meant to discredit the U.S. government’s whole approach to budget planning, you’d struggle to improve on the proposal announced this week by President Joe Biden’s administration. Admittedly, these plans rarely tell the public much about what’s likely to happen. But the 2023 budget goes one better: It says next to nothing about what the administration would even like to happen.
The 149-page document, plus expansive appendices and supplementary materials, tucks the administration’s core fiscal-policy ambitions into an empty line and a footnote. This says the budget includes a “reserve” for “legislation that reduces costs, expands productive capacity, and reforms the tax system” — without specifying the associated outlays or revenue, or any actual policy.