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Spending $6 Trillion and Scrapping the Hyde Amendment

Spending $6 Trillion and Scrapping the Hyde Amendment

Last updated on: May 31, 2021 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Spending $6 Trillion and Scrapping the Hyde Amendment 2021-05-29T16:37:37-04:00 Gene Veith

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President Biden has submitted his 2022 budget, which comes in at $6 trillion. That would be the highest level of government spending since World War II. And it signals the biggest, most all-encompassing government in our nation’s history. And it would force all taxpayers to pay for abortions.

The magnitude of this level of spending is hard to comprehend. The budget projects spending to grow even more, to $8 trillion, by 2031. The budget runs a deficit of $1.8 trillion, and it will continue to run a deficit of at least $1.3 trillion for every year for the rest of the decade. By then, the deficit will be 117% of the entire economy. In just two years, federal indebtedness as a share of the entire national economy will exceed what it was during World War II, when the nation was completely mobilized in a fight for its life. Yet today we have no war, no depression, and are in the beginnings of an economic boom. We’ll see if that can last if this scale of government spending comes to pass.

But fear not, says the budget. Tax increases will also accumulate and will begin to cut the deficit beginning in the 2030s.

Do you realize how much taxes will have to soar in order to cover this much spending? President Biden assures us that only businesses and the wealthy will pay more taxes. But will there be enough businesses and wealthy people left, once this kind of spending impacts the private economy? Or will inflation–the inevitable consequence of so much new government-printed money being injected into the economy–put us all in the category of being wealthy, as we push our wheelbarrows of cash to the grocery store, even though most things will be too expensive for us to buy?

President Biden’s plan covers his infrastructure plan, his family plan, his environmental plan, his healthcare plan, his bailout plan, his welfare plan, and on and on.

The budget also includes his abortion plan. It scraps the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds–that is to say, taxpayer money–from paying for abortions.

Democratic as well as Republican presidents and lawmakers have supported this provision ever since it was enacted in 1976. It has been included in every federal budget since that time. Until now.

Estimates are that the Hyde Amendment has saved some 50,000 lives per year, for a total of more than 2 million.

But Democrats want Medicaid, the government’s health plan for poor people, to pay for abortions. They are even framing it as a social justice issue, saying that the lack of Medicaid coverage is racist because it discriminates against Black people. As if the priority of aborting Black children were not itself racist to the core.

To be sure, presidential budgets rarely get through Congress as submitted. But Democrats are highly committed to the programs President Biden is pushing, so they may well use the budget reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered, to push them through.

And at least three Democrats in the Senate, Joe Manchin (WV), Bob Casey (Pa), and Tim Kaine (Va) support the Hyde Amendment, so the chance of eliminating it completely is small, at least for now. (This sympathetic article describes the pro-abortion politicians’ “backup plan,” how they have been providing money for abortion despite the Hyde Amendment by giving non-abortion-specific grants to Planned Parenthood.)

At any rate, the budget shows what our government wants to do and how it recognizes no financial limits to its ambitions. And how it would run rough-shod over any of its citizens’ qualms about becoming complicit in abortion.

Again, this is not the time for Christians and other conservatives to quit their political involvement.

Illustration: A child’s handprint in red ink by b0red via FreeImg, Creative Commons 0, Public Domain

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