I’ve been following economic policy closely since Richard Nixon’s assault on economic freedom with his August 15, 1971, economywide price controls. While there have been ebbs and flows in economic freedom in the fifty years since then, I have never seen anything like the full court press against economic freedom exercised by President Biden and his administration. To the extent it succeeds, it will not only reduce our freedom but also slow the growth of our real income.

If you think Biden’s policies compare to Jimmy Carter’s, you would be wrong. Carter’s energy policies were horrendous. He continued Nixon’s and Ford’s price controls on oil and gasoline until he finally started to phase them out in his last year in office; he dictated minimum and maximum temperatures for buildings; and he set energy standards for appliances that have made them less useful and more expensive. In one of his worst hires, he appointed G. William Miller as chairman of the Federal Reserve and Miller went on to print more money and cause more inflation. But Carter was a leader in ending economic regulation of airlines, of trucking, and of railroads. Airline deregulation made airline travel cheaper and made it much easier for middle-class people to fly multiple times a year. Trucking and rail deregulation made those shipping modes more efficient and cheaper. And in 1979 he appointed Paul Volcker as fed chairman and Volcker went on to follow a semi-monetarist policy that, under President Reagan, brought inflation down to low single digits. Carter also signed a tax bill in 1978 that reduced the tax rate on long-term capital gains.

Nothing that the Biden administration has done or is proposing on economic policy is comparable to Carter’s accomplishments. On every front, Biden and his appointees are pushing for massively higher spending, taxes, and regulation. Moreover, simply looking at the budget numbers, scary as they are, understates the damage because of the particular way the proposed programs are structured. Many of the programs set up bad disincentives and also intrude in private decision making that has worked out fairly well.

These are the opening three paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “The Biden Assault on Economic Freedom and Prosperity,” Defining Ideas, October 21, 2021.

And note this on the proposal for reducing further people’s financial privacy:

Arguably the most intrusive regulation the Biden administration proposes is the one on people’s accounts in financial institutions. USA Today recently corrected an InfoWars exaggeration of the plan. The InfoWars headline: “Biden’s Treasury Dept. Declares IRS Will Monitor Transactions of ALL U.S. Accounts Over $600.” USA Today pointed out two mistakes. First, the Treasury can’t make such a move without Congress’s authorization. Second, writes Ella Lee of USA Today, “[E]ven if the proposal is adopted banks would not provide access to individual transactions, just the total amount flowing in and out of an account annually.” The correction is important but is it supposed to be comforting? Democrats announced that they would raise the threshold from $600 to $10,000. But you need only have an average of $834 a month flowing out of your account to trigger IRS surveillance. So the IRS would know more about the majority of account holders than they do now.

Recently, Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about the proposal. Yellen claimed that it was to catch wealthy people who are massively evading taxes. Yellen gave an example of someone who reports income of $10,000 but has $3 million flowing out of his checking account. Said Yellen: “That tells the IRS that’s an individual you might audit.” And this has exactly what to do with people whose flow out of their bank account is $10,000? Yellen was widely regarded as a first-rate economist. Surely, she’s still enough of an economist to know the difference between $10,000 and $3 million. Her sticking to her guns on the surveillance proposal suggests something more sinister: that she wants to go after, not the just the high-rolling tax cheats, but also, say, the gardener who gets away with paying a few hundred dollars less in taxes in a year.

Read the whole thing.

I just noticed that this is my 4,000th post on EconLog.