Fleischer: Reconciliation bill is '$3.5T in spending for a nation that's already going broke'
The panelists of 'Special Report with Bret Baier' take on Congressional infighting over the social spending bill, supply chain issues, and Vice President Kamala Harris' space video.
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act should be rechristened the Build Bigotry Better Act. And then it should be buried in a shallow grave on Capitol Hill.
This socialist tax-and spendathon, currently pushed by Biden and top congressional Democrats, reputedly would devour $3.2 trillion. As if! Once stripped of accounting gimmicks and augmented with $200 billion in debt-service obligations, this leviathan’s true, 10-year cost totals $5.9 trillion. That equals $41,172 for each of America’s 143.3 million taxpayers.
But this extravaganza’s eye-popping tab is just one of its fatal flaws. This bill’s policies are nightmarish at any price. Atop $2.3 trillion in tax increases, lush entitlements, and unicorn-powered Green New Deal experiments, BBBA is a lavish slush fund for critical race theorists.
Final legislation likely will emerge, fully formed, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office -- if the Democrat Party’s left and far-Left wings ever flap in unison.
For now, BBBA’s current draft rambles on, Biden-like, for 2,465 mind-numbing, bankruptcy inducing pages. Within this text, one race-fueled time bomb after another just waits to explode if, God forbid, Biden signs this measure into law:
•To qualify for $39.6 billion in federal grants, a government school system must submit "a local facilities master plan to address the health, safety, education equity, enrollment diversity, environmental sustainability, and climate resiliency of the public-school facilities operated by such agency." (Page 55)
•This bill earmarks "Tuition assistance for Alaska native-serving institutions, Asian-American and Native-American Pacific-Islander serving institutions, Native American-serving nontribal institutions, native Hawaiian-serving institutions, and predominantly black institutions." (Page 127)
Irish need not apply.
•The $1 billion "Electric Vehicle Charging Equity Program" would "give priority to projects that...utilize or involve locally owned small and disadvantaged businesses, including women and minority-owned businesses." (Page 465)
A white guy named Elon Musk knows a little about electric vehicles. Is he eligible for a charging-equity grant?
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•BBBA mandates "promoting equity" in Medicaid’s home- and community-based services. (Page 575)
•$1 billion, in part to employ "faculty from racial and ethnic groups who are underrepresented among the medical and other health professions." (Page 676)
•$175 million for maternal-health facilities that display "racial and ethnic disparities," even if unrelated to racism. (Page 696)
•$100 million for "cybersecurity workforce development and education" at "minority-serving institutions and community colleges." (Page 897)
•$750 million for research on Family and Medical Leave benefits and disparities involving "race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, national origin, family composition, or living arrangements." (Page 1,288)
•Pursuant to federal decree, employers must provide, "to the extent available," information on the races, sexes, sexual orientations, gender identities, and other characteristics of paid-leave beneficiaries "for the purposes of promoting equity." (Page 1,310)
To fathom BBBA’s priorities, consider how many times it mentions these terms according to a key word search of the legislation:
•Equity - 44
•Ethnic - 41
•Racial - 34
•Race - 21
•Merit - 4
•Equality - 0
This bill will dispatch countless federal ethnocrats to decide who is white, Black, or otherwise and then deny or disburse billions of taxpayer dollars due to applicants’ complexions.
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BBBA will underwrite a brigade of racial bean counters to obsess over melanin and decide which people can or cannot convert their pigmentation into paydays. This op-ed alone outlines a $42.6 billion race-driven jackpot.
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"Critical race theory is an ideology that is almost entirely subsidized by taxpayers," says Chris Rufo, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute. "The theories were developed in publicly-financed and publicly-subsidized universities, and now they are being installed as ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ departments in every government agency in the nation. It is not an organic philosophy. It's an elite-driven, parasitic ideology whose host is the state."
Rufo believes that BBBA’s systemic racialism will suck Uncle Sam even drier.
"The Biden Administration wants to accelerate this process and install critical race theory ideology further into the bureaucracy of the federal government," Rufo tells me. "It must be stopped. It must be resisted. ‘Ban critical race theory’ should be the conservative slogan moving forward."
One of former President Donald J. Trump’s top advisers also sounds the klaxons over this looming danger.
"President Biden’s reconciliation bill is not a stimulus package. It’s not an infrastructure proposal. It’s not pork barrel spending. No, it’s the radical, fundamental and explicit reordering of American society around the Marxist concept of racial equity," warns Stephen Miller, founder of America First Legal, a public-interest law firm.
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"Equity is the sanitized term of choice deployed by the hard-Left to encompass the entire panoply of government policies that institutionalize Critical Race Theory into the machinery of government," Miller tells me. "Equity is CRT put into practice: It demolishes and replaces equality as the foundational principle of American life and wields fearsome federal government power to exclude, punish, prejudge, evaluate, stereotype, segregate, and obsessively categorize American citizens on the basis of skin color."
The fact that it weaponizes federal racial fetishism is just one of 5.9 trillion reasons why Joe Biden’s abominable Build Bigotry Better Act deserves blistering defeat.
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