No nation, no people, no civilization, in the entire span of human history, has ever taxed and spent its way into prosperity. No nation, no people, no civilization, in the entire span of human history, has ever been able to lift people out of poverty by giving them handouts. Every nation that has increased the standard of living of its people has done so through trade, enterprise, innovation, and production - from ancient Rome to the United States of America.
Democrats don't seem to have absorbed these historical facts. They keep running back to the same old well, taxing the rich, giving to the poor, and it fails. Every time, it fails. And the Biden administration is no exception. A recent editorial at Issues & Insights made some interesting points.
While still in the White House, Biden promised that if reelected, he would levy a billionaire tax on the wealthiest Americans. It wasn’t the first time. During his 2023 State of the Union address, he railed that “the tax system is not fair, it’s not fair.” A year earlier, he proposed a “billionaire minimum income tax.”
Even before he was president, Biden was fond of demanding that the rich pay their “fair share,” which makes a snappy sound bite but leaves open exactly what a “fair share” is and who gets to decide what rates are “fair.”
Fortunately, Biden never got his billionaire tax.
The billionaire tax, depending on what form it took, would have been counterproductive at best. The most likely result of such taxes, everywhere they are tried, is to simply cause the people affected to leave for a more tax-friendly locale. "Autopen Joe" Biden's billionaire tax may have been great for Swiss banks, or for banks in the Cayman Islands, but it would have done nothing for the American working class or the poor.
A big part of the problem is that people at these levels aren't necessarily making their money from employment but rather by investment, and you can't tax unrealized income. Also, the "wealth" taxes proposed by many on the left, most notably the economically illiterate Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are specifically prohibited by Article 1, Section 2. The income tax took a specific constitutional amendment, the 16th, to evade the apportionment clause.
In this, the Biden people would have stupidly tried to place a tax on the people who can most easily avoid it.
But he did succeed in making life more difficult for the poor. Both the overall and child poverty rates swelled while he was in office. The overall poverty rate grew by 40.2% from 2020 to 2024. The child poverty rate spiked by 38.1% over that same period.
“If you choose 2019 as your point of comparison, the increase in poverty under Biden is bad. If you choose 2020, it’s catastrophic,” says Jacobin magazine, which considers itself “a leading voice of the American left” that offers a “socialist perspective.”
As it happens, 2019 was the year Biden told “rich donors at a ritzy New York fundraiser” that poverty was “the one thing that can bring this country down.” Salon said he “listed several new programs to help the poor that he would fund if elected.”
“We have all the money we need to do it,” he said.
When you're pushing leftist economic policies, and you've lost the Jacobin magazine, well, you're in deep doo.
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The war on poverty is over. Joe Biden, with his clueless policies, with his feckless administration of incompetents, raised the white flag. They talked a lot, but never did anything worth mentioning.
Democrats seem to want to position themselves as Robin Hood, in their claims to take from the rich and give to the poor. But, as they so often do, Democrats get it wrong. That's not what the Robin Hood of legend did. What he did was lead a rebellion against an illegitimate, authoritarian dictatorship. He stole, yes; he robbed the agents of that government and the people who were the beneficiaries of the autocrats. He robbed them of tax revenues, taken from the people by threat of force, and gave the poor, the taxpayers, their own property back.
That's a lesson Democrats will never absorb.
We will never eliminate poverty, and there's a simple reason for it: Just as rich people will keep doing the things that made them rich, many poor people will keep doing the things that made them poor. Like death and taxes, the poor will always be with us. But here, in the United States, there's a difference, one that sets our republic apart from most of the nations in human history: There is little or no abject poverty in the United States. There is only relative poverty. The biggest health crisis affecting the American poor now is obesity, whereas the defining aspect of abject poverty is malnutrition or outright starvation.
But some are in poverty because they are young. After all, they are just starting out. They haven't yet built a career or become established in a trade. That's part of the picture, too, and those young people need no handouts; they need opportunities. To reduce poverty in America, we need to become once more a nation that makes things, that produces. It is industry, innovation, opportunity, and, yes, work, that lifts people out of poverty. Not taxes. Not handouts. We must not put another generation in the mouse utopia of a welfare system. We must put them, instead, to work.
