The surge of inflation that has hammered household budgets since 2021 was not random. It’s largely the result of policy choices made or promoted by the Biden-Harris administration.

It’s clear, from the details Vice President Kamala Harris has released about her proposed economic platform, that she has no intention of reversing the disastrous legacy of Bidenomics. Indeed, she has even more dangerous plans waiting in the wings.

In 2021 and 2022, President Joe Biden approved trillions of dollars’ worth of inflationary spending and tax credits, with Harris twice casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate.

The bills included enormous slush funds for state governments, welfare expansions that reduced the labor supply and weakened supply chains, and costly subsidies for “green” energy and electric vehicles.

Not content with the legislative spending spree, Biden caused another $700 billion in deficit increases through administrative changes.

The most notable of these has been the repeated (and repeatedly unlawful) attempt to erase student loan debts, which transfers the obligation to taxpayers. Unsurprisingly, Harris has been a strong supporter of this scheme.

Not only have families struggled to deal with rising prices, but they face an additional burden: higher interest rates imposed by the combination of federal deficits and Federal Reserve actions to fight inflation. The median monthly payment on a new home mortgage has more than doubled since 2021.

When it comes to addressing high prices and costly housing, Harris has announced plans that would be not just ineffective, but counterproductive.

For example, giving $25,000 of taxpayer money toward the down payment on a new home would inject more demand into the market and escalate bidding wars, leading to higher prices.

The proposal to impose federal limits on rental housing — which Biden originally put forward — would cause property owners to pull some units off the market and reduce incentives to build. That would reduce the supply of housing and drive prices higher still.

Similarly, the Harris push to stop “price gouging” at grocery stores would wreak havoc on an industry with an average profit margin of just more than 1%.

One aspect of the Biden agenda that has (thankfully) not come to pass is an array of tax hikes proposed in his annual budgets.

Yet even here, Harris wants to carry the torch of Bidenomics forward.

If she follows the Biden plan in full, the total tax bill would be an eye-watering $5 trillion. Not only would that mean shrinking the private sector for the sake of increasing Washington’s control over the economy, but the taxes in question would be especially destructive.

Raising the corporate tax from 21% to 28% would place U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage against those based in most of the developed world. This picture is even worse when you factor in state-level corporate taxes — bringing the true corporate tax range in the U.S. to between 25.8% and 32.3%, depending on the state.

The nations of the European Union, hardly a low-tax haven, have an average corporate tax of 21%. Even communist China only levies a 25% tax on businesses.

Boosting taxes on capital gains to 44.6% would dramatically reduce the incentive to invest in new and growing businesses, leading to less job creation and slower wage growth.

Most troubling of all is the push for taxing “wealth.”

Not only would this be flatly unconstitutional, but it would also ignore worldwide evidence that such taxes cause tremendous economic damage for the sake of relatively little revenue. Most developed countries that have imposed such a tax have since repealed them as a result.

The legacy of Bidenomics is higher prices, corrupt handouts to political allies, and driving the federal government towards bankruptcy.

Kamalanomics appears to be more of the same, along with the potential of tax increases that would cripple economic growth.

Is that really the path Americans want to take?

David Ditch is a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.

This should come as no surprise, since excessive deficit spending from Washington remains much too high. In 2023, the federal government spent $6.1 trillion (roughly $47,000 per household) and ran a staggering $1.7 trillion deficit.

Yet the Biden administration seems determined to make this worse, consistently choosing policies that increase deficits in pursuit of its ideological agenda. The country can’t afford such reckless spending. The economy would run smoother with lower deficits.

Too many elected officials, however, either don’t know this — or don’t care. They view the federal government as an enormous piggy bank.

The Biden administration has aggressively used the swamp’s enormous budgets to fund leftist causes through grants.

Here are a few examples of such grants that the administration has approved since December 2022:

• $45 million for a “diversity and inclusion” scholarship in Burma. Not content with pushing the DEI fad in America, the administration is also subsidizing it globally.

Burma (also known as Myanmar) has serious problems, including a badly flawed judicial system, rampant corruption and high poverty due to a lack of property rights and heavy government interference in the economy. A $45 million DEI scholarship will do nothing to address those problems.

• $3 million for “girl-centered climate action” in Brazil. Not content with creating a “climate corps” in America, the administration gave a grant to an organization based in the Netherlands to promote DEI-infused environmental activism in Brazil.

As with Burma, this grant focuses on niche far-left concerns rather than the genuine problems facing South America’s largest country.

• $125 million to racialize public health. The CDC has faced growing criticism in recent years for its politicized and unconstitutional response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its promotion of gender ideology, and more.

Its $124.9 million grant to the National Network of Public Health Institutes threatens to further damage the already frayed relationship between public health groups and the American people.

The group’s “racial justice competency model” is rooted in critical race theory, which claims that any outcome gaps between racial groups must be caused by systemic racism. A fixation on addressing “inequities” means forcing CRT ideology on the medical system, which is the last thing America needs.

• $573,000 to anti-Israel group for fighting “disinformation.” The Biden administration has embraced the left’s crusade against “disinformation,” which is often code for censoring contrary opinions.

This approach also applies to foreign policy, as the State Department has provided grants to many organizations working abroad. A problematic example of this is two grants worth more than $573,000 to Virginia-based MENAACTION.

Key members of the group have parroted disinformation themselves, repeating false claims made about Israel’s fight against Hamas. So not only are anti-disinformation grants of dubious value to begin with, but these grants seem likely to spread rather than restrain disinformation.

• $288,563 for “diverse” bird watcher groups. Proving that nothing is safe from the reach of DEI-mania, the National Science Foundation approved a grant for having ornithological societies (bird aficionados) create “affinity groups” based on identity characteristics.

Rather than being based on serious evidence of bigotry or discrimination — as though bird watching groups are nests of racists — it’s instead predicated on some members “[lacking] a sense of community or feel[ing] their voices are not being heard.”

Such vibes-based concerns might be worth addressing with internal meetings. However, the federal government has absolutely no business getting involved, especially when the gross national debt is $34.6 trillion.

Wasteful grants are impossible to avoid when the federal government has grown to such a bloated mess. However, the Biden administration has made this worse by green-lighting absurd projects such as these.

As Congress starts work on legislation to fund the federal government in 2025, legislators should examine the agencies and programs funding these grants when they look for places to find savings for taxpayers.

The Biden administration certainly won’t.

David Ditch is a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.

Once again, Congress debated its annual spending bills. And once again, a fiscal deadline loomed, with a partial government shutdown set for Friday had Congress not passed something in time.

Considering that the gross national debt is now over $100,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, having Congress focus on spending might seem like a good thing.

Unfortunately, only a few dozen legislators seem concerned about unsustainable and inflationary deficit spending. A much larger group is focused on delivering taxpayer-funded handouts to selected special interests.

Americans are understandably exhausted by the seemingly endless drama and dysfunction flowing from the nation’s capital, especially when there is so little to show for it. Congress hasn’t done its job of passing all the spending bills on time since the Clinton administration.

Here are three core problems with the current budget problems, along with solutions to address each.

PROBLEM 1: Congress struggles to complete the budget and spending problem on time, leading to awkward continuing resolutions and potential shutdowns.

SOLUTION: While it might seem easy to blame this failure on partisanship or incompetence, the simple fact is that the U.S. federal government has swollen into an incomprehensibly large mass of bureaucracies and programs.

Debating the proper amount to spend on core priorities such as national defense and veterans’ benefits is already a heavy lift. Haggling over funding for thousands of questionable line items such as maple syrup subsidies, the African Development Foundation and Title X Family Planning program is something else entirely.

Add to that the enormous amount of effort that members offices and the appropriations committees put into reviewing tens of thousands of requests for earmarks — aka pork projects — and it’s no wonder that Congress has a hard time reaching consensus.

Streamlining the federal government would not only help move the budget closer to balance, but it would also dramatically simplify the spending process.

PROBLEM 2: Spending bills get merged into “omnibus” packages that are thousands of pages long, and members are often expected to vote with only a few hours’ notice.

Another part of the imbalance that rank-and-file members face is that Congressional Budget Office analysis of appropriations bills is only delivered to a handful of high-ranking offices. This allows appropriators and leadership to break budget rules while hiding that fact from the rest of the world.

SOLUTION: Shrinking the number of programs and agencies would reduce the page count of spending packages. However, that wouldn’t address the inherently broken nature of forcing legislators to vote on important bills without having enough time to properly evaluate them.

Congress should have at least a week’s notice to vote on regular spending bills to allow for proper review and debate. In addition, the “score” of the bills should be published just like any other bill.

PROBLEM 3: The federal government is on pace for a $2 trillion deficit, an amount that is unprecedented by any measure when there is no major war or sharp recession to explain it. However, the spending bills that Congress bickers over every year cover less than one-third of federal spending, because the rest is on autopilot.

SOLUTION: The budget process should be more comprehensive, forcing Congress to seriously look at the totality of spending and address (rather than ignore) dangerously high deficits.

Americans seeking an example of responsible governance should look at Switzerland.

The Swiss enacted a system in 2003 that keeps overall spending levels in check based on the business cycle, allowing modest deficits during recessions that are paid off during growth years. As a result, their debt has remained at a healthy level while Uncle Sam’s debts have skyrocketed.

Taxpayers should be under no illusion that any of these solutions would be an easy fix, especially since they involve removing power and control from the big-spending establishment.

The last time Washington did anything meaningful to reduce deficits was because of pressure (and political consequences) from the tea party movement. The nation needs something similar once again to stop the endless flow of red ink from drowning the economy.

David Ditch is a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.

That may sound hyperbolic, but consider the numbers. The sum of new spending authorizations between 2020 and 2022 was a staggering $7.5 trillion — more than $57,400 per household.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, roughly $700 billion (less than 10% of the total) was directed toward public health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the spending spree focused on welfare expansions, cash handouts and opportunistic subsidies for a variety of special interests.

Badly flawed, Keynesian “stimulus” spending escalated even after the economy had stabilized in the summer of 2020.

Legislative packages passed in December 2020 and March 2021 combined to dump trillions of dollars into the economy. Such reckless, unrestrained spending was the definition of inflationary.

The Federal Reserve’s role is often overlooked. The Fed purchased a massive volume of Treasury securities from 2020 through 2021, covering almost all above-baseline spending during the period. This not only created money out of thin air, but also served to provide artificial demand for federal debt at low interest rates.

Without the Fed’s intervention, global markets would have struggled to absorb the historic volume of debt that Washington issued, triggering demand for higher interest rates. Since Congress did not face immediate discipline from debt markets, the spending spree continued long after it was remotely justified.

American families have paid and continue to pay a steep price for the greedy indulgence of politicians. Inflation spiked in 2021 and 2022 with sky-high deficit spending as one of the primary drivers.

Households have lost thousands of dollars in purchasing power as a result. While the rate of inflation is now lower than it was a year ago, prices are still rising faster than before the pandemic. Families are struggling to catch up to the 17% price hike that has already been baked into the system.

The Fed eventually responded with a dramatic increase in interest rates and reducing the monetary supply. While that did help to bring the rate of inflation down, it also had serious consequences for financial markets.

This was especially the case for mortgages, as the combination of high list prices and higher interest rates pushed the dream of home ownership even further away for millions of Americans. Over this period, mortgage rates have increased almost 2.5-fold and total interest on a new mortgage on a median home is over $300,000 higher than before.

In turn, higher interest rates have increased the cost of servicing the now mountainous federal debt. This will mean hundreds of billions of dollars per year of deadweight drag on the economy for decades to come.

Incredibly, Washington still refuses to act with a modicum of responsibility.

The so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act highlighted this reality. The package was loaded with tens of billions of dollars in budget gimmicks so that Congress could pretend that there would be spending reductions without the political inconvenience of actually reducing spending.

The Biden administration’s supplemental spending request is another way for Congress to dodge the slightest amount of budgeting.

By claiming that spending on Ukraine and natural disasters shouldn’t count toward spending caps, the administration and many congressional leaders are demonstrating that they have no problem with tens of billions in additional deficit spending regardless of the cost to the American people.

It seems increasingly unlikely that the legislators will choose the path of fiscal sanity on their own. Fortunately, there is a somewhat recent example of turning things around.

The tea party movement, which began as a reaction to bailouts and overspending, led to spending restraint and deficit reduction in Washington. While the pandemic-era spending spree undid this progress, the fact remains that public pressure can push Congress in the right direction.

The alternative is the destruction of the growth and prosperity that are at the core of the American dream.

David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, and Richard Stern, the center’s director, are the authors of a new Heritage report, “The Road to Inflation: How an Unprecedented Federal Spending Spree Created Economic Turmoil.”

The Biden administration is promoting its American Jobs Plan as an “infrastructure” proposal. In reality, it’s a gargantuan tax-and-spend package that would expand federal power and control in a wide variety of areas.

Although the plan is hyped as a path toward shared goals such as “jobs” and “global competitiveness,” a closer look reveals that it suffers from four core problems that completely undermine those goals.

Problem 1: Destructive tax hikes.

Just as the economy is pulling out of the pandemic recession, the plan would slam businesses with $2.7 trillion in tax increases over the next 15 years.

This would reduce incentives for businesses to take risks in hiring new employees and make entrepreneurs less likely to take the biggest risk of all: starting a new enterprise. Over time that would have the effect of reducing economic growth, which means fewer jobs and lower wages.

In addition, the tax hike would cause America to have the second-highest rate for corporations among major economies after accounting for federal and state taxes. That would hamstring our economic competitiveness, directly contradicting one of the plan’s goals.

Problem 2: Federal infrastructure spending that fails to create jobs.

In order to create jobs, the plan would have to overcome the number of jobs destroyed by the tax increase. It would fall well short of just breaking even.

The infrastructure part of the plan follows the same failed path as the 2009 stimulus bill signed by President Barack Obama. A 2013 analysis of the Obama stimulus showed that the infrastructure-spending bump served to divert construction workers from private-sector projects to federal projects, meaning there was a minimal amount of job creation.

Further, federal regulations mean that these projects would have inflated costs for materials and labor, reducing the total number of projects and jobs tied to the spending.

Problem 3: Economically harmful central planning.

The plan would lead to more federal involvement in local infrastructure such as schools and water systems, and more micromanagement of private-sector concerns such as energy, manufacturing, housing and more.

In total, this would mean taking a huge amount of money (more than $20,000 per household) from the private economy and redistributing it toward politically favored interests.

History has repeatedly proven that greater government control of the economy leads to worse outcomes. The Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom shows that countries with freer markets experience higher quality of life for metrics ranging from wages to personal health to the environment.

The health of America’s democracy would also take a turn for the worse if Washington gains even more say over local decisions. Local officials are more accountable to voters and more in tune with local needs and preferences than federal bureaucrats are.

Meanwhile, increasing the number of things Congress is responsible for overseeing would be a recipe for disaster regardless of who holds the reins of power. It would make federal elections even more bitter and winner-takes-all than they already are.

Problem 4: Wasteful infrastructure priorities and false advertising.

When federal officials reference infrastructure investments, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the quality of the nation’s highways and bridges, which carry countless amounts of both people and goods from coast to coast and border to border.

However, the Biden plan would only dedicate about 4% of its spending to highways and bridges. It would spend more on mass transit, which carries less than one-tenth as much passenger traffic as highways, and about as much on Amtrak, which was responsible for a microscopic 0.1% of travel in 2019.

Infrastructure projects grow the economy based only on how useful they are. The administration’s decision to prioritize transportation modes that aren’t a fit for America’s geography would lead to a tremendous amount of wasteful spending.

On top of the misguided infrastructure choices, the plan also includes massive amounts of spending that have nothing to do with infrastructure.

This includes hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, “green” slush funds, big subsidies for electric vehicles that will overwhelmingly benefit wealthy households, and a Medicaid benefit expansion. These provisions should stand or fall on their own, not hide behind popular terms like “infrastructure.”

In short, the “American Jobs Plan” would destroy rather than create jobs, harm rather than enhance global competitiveness, and waste huge sums on infrastructure. Congress would be better off using the proposal as a guide for what not to do.

David Ditch is a policy analyst in the Institute for Economic Freedom at The Heritage Foundation. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.