In the middle of the night your drunk father goes to the sugar bowl where your mother and you have put your savings and pulls out $1,000.
He plans to spend $400 on booze and then waste the rest on various items. He spends the $400 on booze.
But on the way home from the bar, he forgets what he planned to do with the remaining $600 in his pocket and falls asleep on a park bench. He’s lucky; no one steals his money and so when he gets home, he still has the $600.
Should you feel happy or angry? My view is that you should feel angry that he spent the $400 but happy that he didn’t spend the remaining $600.
Why am I asking this?
Because I thought of this analogy when I read Peter Suderman’s cleverly titled blog post “Biden’s Legacy: He Didn’t Build That,” Reason, January 16, 2025.
Suderman lays out a number of huge spending programs that Biden got going along with a Democratic Congress. Although the money was authorized, much of it hasn’t been spent.
A key sentence:
According to Politico, Congress authorized more than $1 trillion in spending for Biden’s major climate, clean energy, and infrastructure programs, but more than half of it “has yet to be obligated or is not yet available for agencies to spend.”
The drunk father didn’t spend it all.
Which means, as Suderman writes:
Many of the big projects that received either subsidies or tax breaks under Biden are still essentially imaginary, and some may not happen at all, depending on what President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress choose to pursue.
I’m like the kid who put savings in the sugar bowl: I’m happy that it hasn’t all been spent.
