James Freeman:

If any media folk are still interested in “fact-checking” presidents after the Trump era, they’ll have plenty of fodder from Tuesday night’s appearance by President Joe Biden on CNN. A favorite Biden habit is to appeal to the authority of economists, many of whom remain unnamed, to suggest that his policies are wildly popular among experts. And what would we do without anonymous experts?

Newsweek has a transcript of the event in which CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosted our 46th president at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater. Here’s an excerpt:

COOPER: You’ve made passing a COVID relief bill the focus of your first 100 days. Those on the right say the proposal is too big. Some on the left say it’s not big enough. Are you committed to passing $1.9 trillion bill or is that final number still up for negotiation?
BIDEN: I’m committed to pass — look, here’s — some of you are probably economists or college professors or you’re teachers in school. This is the first time in my career — and as you can tell, I’m over 30 — the first time in my career that there is a consensus among economists left, right, and center that is over — and including the IMF and in Europe, that overwhelming consensus is, in order to grow the economy a year, two, three, and four down the line, we can’t spend too much.

Thank goodness this statement is not accurate. There is not an “overwhelming consensus” among economists that no amount of federal spending is excessive. This column is often skeptical of conventional expert opinion. But even for those who aren’t, the Biden economic plan is notable for the way it has drawn criticism not just from economists in the center and on the right but from Mr. Biden’s own former colleagues on the left. Many of the critiques specifically warn that he is indeed spending too much taxpayer money on a recovering economy which does not need another massive intervention.

Last month this column noted the criticism of Bidenomics from veterans of the Obama economic team. More recently one of the Biden plan’s enthusiastic backers also acknowledged the resistance coming from liberal economists. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker:

If there were any doubt that Joe Biden’s economic proposals represent a big break with the policies of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, the debate about Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief plan dispelled it. For good or ill—and, in my view, it is very positive—the Biden White House is pursuing a bold and aggressive program of Keynesian economic management, the likes of which Washington hasn’t seen since the nineteen-sixties.
The argument began, last week, with a warning about the Biden plan from Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist who served as the Secretary of the Treasury toward the end of the Clinton Administration and as the director of the White House National Economic Council during Obama’s first term. Whatever good the Biden spending package might do in boosting output, wages, and profits, Summers wrote in the Washington Post, it was so large that it could also “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the dollar and financial stability.” Over the weekend, Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, seconded Summers’s concerns, tweeting, “The 1.9 trillion program could overheat the economy so badly as to be counterproductive.”

One can usually count on massive federal programs to be counterproductive, such as the one Mr. Biden helped oversee as Vice President in 2009 and which he reasonably described on Tuesday as “the last experiment we had with stimulus.” Unreasonably for taxpayers, the experiment failed as the plan burned through more than $800 billion and failed miserably to reach its employment goals.

An honest Biden pitch for his current plan would acknowledge that it’s a much more costly experiment based on premises contradicted by both expert opinion and empirical data.

There’s no crisis in the economy other than the pain still being inflicted by Biden allies in teachers unions and state government. A naturally rebounding economy, further juiced by the last massive federal relief bill enacted in December, continues to improve. On Wednesday the Federal Reserve reported the fourth consecutive month of rising U.S. industrial production. And it’s clear from a separate bit of Wednesday news that producers are not having trouble finding consumers. Retail sales surged in January.

If the president wants to insist that America needs unlimited federal spending, he should at least stop pretending it’s a consensus view and admit that it’s his own wacky idea.

---

Daniel J. Mitchell:

The 21st century has been bad news for proponents of limited government. Bush was a big spender, Obama was a big spender, Trump was a big spender, and now Biden also wants to buy votes with other people’s money.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there is still a simple solution to America’s fiscal problems. According to the just-released Budget and Economic Outlook from the Congressional Budget Office, tax revenues will grow by an average of 4.2 percent over the next decade. So we can make progress, as illustrated by this chart, if there’s some sort of spending cap so that outlays grow at a slower pace.

The ideal fiscal goal should be reducing the size of government, ideally down to the level envisioned by America’s Founders.

But even if we have more modest aspirations (avoiding future tax increases, avoiding a future debt crisis), it’s worth noting how modest spending restraint generates powerful results in a short period of time. And the figures in the chart assume the spending restraint doesn’t even start until the 2023 fiscal year.

The main takeaway is that the budget could be balanced by 2031 if spending grows by 1.5 percent per year.

But progress is possible so long as the cap limits spending so that it grows by less than 4.2 percent annually. The greater the restraint, of course, the quicker the progress.

In other words, there’s no need to capitulate to tax increases (which, in any event, almost certainly would make a bad situation worse).

P.S. The solution to our fiscal problem is simple, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. Long-run spending restraint inevitably will require genuine reform to deal with the entitlement crisis. Given the insights of “public choice” theory, it will be a challenge to find politicians willing to save the nation.

P.P.S. Here are real-world examples of nations that made rapid progress with spending restraint.

P.P.P.S. Switzerland and Hong Kong (as well as Colorado) have constitutional spending caps, which would be the ideal approach.

There was no interest in fiscal restraint after 9/11. Nor was there during the Great Recession. Nor has there been during the pandemic. The only way to get closer to balancing the budget (I doubt it will be balanced in the lifetime of anyone reading this) is, as Mitchell points out, mandatory, as in constitutional, spending restraint.

Jonathan Tobin:

If you read the headline of a blockbuster, 6,000-word-plus story in Time magazine, you might think former President Donald Trump wasn’t so wrong about the election, after all.

Despite the tease, Molly Ball’s “Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” doesn’t allege widespread voter fraud in what some Trump supporters still insist was a “stolen” election. Nor is the essay an exposé of illegal activity that would justify the Trumpian challenges to the results that threatened to tear the country apart.

But what Time did uncover is disturbing enough, even if most of those involved are proud of what they did to help elect President Biden: underhanded methods made all the more galling by the preening self-righteousness of those who deployed them.

As the magazine reports, a secret alliance of left-wing activists, union leaders and corporate CEOs worked together to help craft unprecedented changes in the rules governing the way America votes. They did their best to encourage and facilitate mail-in voting on an unprecedented scale.

That wasn’t cheating or illegal, but it was enormously consequential.

With funding from federal sources as well as private moguls like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, this cabal of anti-Trump forces mobilized an enormous number of first-time voters who despised Trump

Using pandemic fears about voting in person — less dangerous, in fact, than a trip to the supermarket — and without a national debate or any meaningful oversight by legislators or the courts, the anti-Trump alliance managed to make it easy for people who don’t normally bother to vote.

That this also involved discarding rules intended to safeguard the integrity of elections was a side benefit.

That the cabal operated successfully in plain sight highlights the impotence of Republicans, who, though they saw the threat coming and in some cases sued to prevent the changes, ultimately failed to prevent the shift. But there’s more here than just a case of the Democrats out-organizing the GOP.

This also involved getting Americans used to the idea that in a country with the most advanced technology in the world, the vote count would last days, rather than being settled in one night.

What Time also documents is a campaign to pressure internet and social media companies as well as press outlets to censor “disinformation” about the election, especially with respect to fraud allegations. While some of the material that was targeted was false, the tech bros also blocked the dissemination of legitimate reporting and commentary that could have undermined Biden.

The best example was The Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling, which was tossed down the Orwellian “memory hole” by both Twitter and all non-conservative media outlets; to boot, 50 former intelligence officials baselessly claimed that the Hunter Files was Russian disinformation. Yet to this day, neither Hunter nor his father has disputed the authenticity of the emails uncovered by The Post or the provenance of the laptop they were recovered from.

Though Time claims the censorship was “defending democracy,” it was actually just the opposite. In a campaign that was represented as a counterattack against Trumpian lies, what the anti-Trump group pulled off was perhaps the biggest lie in modern American political history.

The collusion between Big Tech and biased legacy media prevented the public from learning more about a candidate who largely spent 2020 in hiding. In this way, the anti-Trump forces did help stage an election that was, in a sense, rigged against the incumbent.

There’s nothing wrong with getting more people to vote, as long as the votes are legal. But there is something profoundly wrong with a system in which Silicon Valley oligarchs, big business, union bosses and lefty agitators can effectively shut down free discourse and freedom of the press during a presidential election in order to ensure their candidate wins.

That means the challenge facing the country is not what to do about Trump’s sore-loser tantrum, which resulted in a disgraceful riot (swollen into an “insurrection” by Democrats and media keen to discredit all Republicans). The real problem is whether Americans are prepared to let the same forces that tilted the 2020 election in Biden’s favor get away with it again.