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Those trillions add up

President Joe Biden, fresh from signing his nearly $2 trillion COVID-19 relief law, is now proposing another $2 trillion package to rebuild and expand the nation’s infrastructure.

The late Illinois Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen is often quoted as saying of the federal budget, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”

So it goes with Biden’s proposals. The U.S. national debt has zoomed past $28 trillion — that’s $85,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

Heaven knows the U.S. infrastructure is in need of help, and those kinds of projects are expensive. We wonder, though, how it will be paid for?

Biden wants to spend $650 billion for rebuilding roads, highways and ports, $400 billion for care of the elderly and disabled, $300 billion for housing infrastructure and $300 billion for reviving U.S. manufacturing. He plans to pay for it with new tax increases, especially focusing on corporations, undoing much of the Trump tax cuts from 2017.

Will the long-term effect of a massive investment in infrastructure overcome, in the long run, the impact of tax increases on U.S. corporations and the economy?

Biden is betting $2 trillion on it.

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