America's Talking - Biden Budget Seeks to Spend Hundreds of Millions to Train School Teachers in DEI

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

President Joe Biden's budget proposal seeks to set aside billions of dollars to push progressive gender, sexuality and race ideology at home and around the globe. Released this week, the $7.3 trillion budget also proposes spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to train school teachers in diversity, equity, and inclusion dogma. The White House touted the spending in its announcement of Biden’s budget, which includes $3 billion to “advance gender equity and equality worldwide.” Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAelib, Chief Content Officer at the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday, March 15. President Joe Biden released his fiscal 2025 budget plan this week, a $7.3 trillion proposal that includes $5.5 trillion in tax increases and would continue to increase the national debt, which already has soared to more than $34.5 trillion. dollars. Joining me today to discuss the president's budget proposal is the center square's Washington, D.C. Bureau chief, Casey, you've been taking a deep dive into the document, looking at various spending proposals throughout a number of departments. But why don't we start with the top line?

Tell us about the plan and what it would mean for taxpayers. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely interesting to dive into the plan, Dan. And as you said, $7.3 trillion in spending. We see a lot of tax increases, which we can go into in this, in this budget. It's worth pointing out that the president's budget, you know, never gets passed as is wholesale through Congress. In fact, it's not even really written as a piece of legislation so that it could be scored by the CBO. It's a very long document, but it's more of a document than a piece of legislation. It lays out spending priorities, top line numbers, the goals. So we've been digging through that.

But it's impossible to get a perfectly accurate score from CBO or something like that. And there are some things missing from the budget, as others have pointed out as well, such as how Trump or how Biden would deal with certain Trump-era tax cuts that might expire. And so there are some things missing, but you get some top-line things. And really this budget sets the tone for, you know, the next year of negotiations, the president saying, this is what we want. This is the kind of deficit I'm okay with. These are the priorities. And so first, the deficit. The deficit under Biden would be a nearly $2 trillion deficit day for the next fiscal year. That's even with him creating a budget that he doesn't really have to get passed. So, you know, even when he could just

theoretically cut whatever spending he wanted and not have to get any lawmakers to sign on, he can't get the budget below about $1.8 or the deficit below $1.8 trillion. This is a reminder for people. The deficit is how much debt we incur annually, which is different from the national debt, as you said, which is $34 trillion. So on the national debt, under this budget, the national debt would rise to about $45 trillion, I believe, I believe by 2034. So just a, you know, just a few years, about a decade, be up to $45 trillion. And honestly, we all know it's really going to be higher than that, because whenever they, Congress and lawmakers and presidents, both parties, they all do it, where they put all the benefits early on and then they push all the cost, you know,

decades down the road so that they're always pushing the cost back. So they have a way of kind of making the numbers look a little better than they are. We can get into some more of the, you know, the tax increases, but I'll just say there's a big emphasis, and I've written about this at the sooner square.com, on the, you know, for instance, the equity agenda. I looked through the budget, Dan, and the, for instance, since the word diversity is used 10 times, some form of gender is used 22 times, inclusion, about 17.

And the word equity is used about 80 times in the budget. So for comparison, the word border only appears 65 times and the word defense 70 times. So equity is mentioned more than both border and defense, which gives you an idea as some of the priorities in the budget. So let's stick with this theme and we'll come back to the proposed tax increases a little bit later, Casey. As you reported, Biden's budget includes about $3 billion to, quote, advance gender equity and equity and equality worldwide. So I get it, Democrats, one of their big policy initiatives is equity, inclusion, et cetera. Why would we be spending billions of dollars on other countries on the equity initiative? Yeah, that's, I mean, that is a big question.

Biden has taken fire for this. That is, you know, with that number you cited is for the global spending. There's a lot of spending projects domestically that would inflate that three billion number. But we spend, as you said, literally billions of dollars in other countries advancing gender equity. Now, some of this is stuff that I think many people would consider legitimate, like women's rights, you know, women's access to certain resources. But that word, you know, gender equality, that word has been, the definition has been expanded in the recent years to include basically the entire transgender agenda, which is much more controversial, I think, than any kind of women's rights efforts. And it's definitely pulling away money from, you know, fighting for women's rights or women's rights to vote in a country that doesn't have that. Now that money is going to the LGBT agenda. An example that, you know, I found a USAID, which is our foreign aid office. They partnered in India to create a transgender salon, hair salon, right? So, of course, I'm kind of just cherry picking an example, of course, and there's a lot of other things going on.

But I think it's an important example because people can brush this off and saying we're making something out of it that it's not. But in one example, we, you know, federal tax dollars and resources went to partnering with a hair salon in India that is for transgender people. So, you know, I think some people will be shocked to hear something like that. That's what we mean when we say advancing gender equity and equality. worldwide. And it's literally other countries and even countries that are not friendly to these ideas. And it does hurt our relationship with them. Many Muslim countries are not interested in the LGBT agenda. Many African Christian countries, it's, you know, banned or they're just not interested in it. So there is a financial cost and there is a foreign, a diplomatic cost to these policies as well. You know, in a 7.3 trillion dollar

budget proposal proposing spending millions of dollars on those initiatives overseas, you know, that might seem like chump change in the grand scheme of things. But those things add up. And of course, with the national debt, we have our own financial issues over here. Biden's budget proposal only will increase the national debt. There's concerns about the solvency of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid programs. So every, you know, every single dime that the president proposes to spend, should be scrutinized because of this current financial situation of the United States and the more than $34 trillion in debt that's only going to go up and that future taxpayers are going to be burdened with.

Let's go back to the tax increases. Casey, what is the, in the last minute or two that we have, what are the proposed tax increases in Biden's budget? Yeah, so there are several. You see a 25% minimum tax on billionaires. for example, which Biden made a lot of hay about in his state of the union speech. We also know that a big priority for Biden is increasing auditing of Americans. Right.

So he wants to ramp up IRS funding so they can conduct more audits, which will, you know, increase revenue without actually having to add new taxes. He wants to, you know, have a high, a very high corporate tax rate for the developed world. tax more, you know, tax on invest income. So there's a list here. People can read more about it, the center square.com. There's surtax on small business income. So there's a lot of little, these taxes kind of add up. And to your point about, you know, sometimes you can scrutinize spending like the hair salon and the billions for gender equity. But when we're in a deficit, a $1.8 trillion deficit under this budget, by a definition, $1.8 trillion needs to be cut. And so when we look at the spending that's more controversial, it raises a question is maybe this is where we should

start when we try and to balance the budget. Casey, thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with President Biden's budget proposal and other stories at the center square.com.