Joe Biden has now thrown his presidential wanna-be hat into the proverbial ring, along with about 20 other Democrats. On the day he announced, Joe told the country that he wants to take America “back like we used to be”.

Well, I’m curious. What America is it that Joe wants to lead us back to? Is it the America he and Barack Obama imposed on us in the 8 years of failure between 2009 and 2016? Is it the America laboring under the national debt that he voted to push into the stratosphere from 1973 to 2009 while he was in the Senate, when the debt climbed from $458 billion to $12 trillion? Maybe Joe means going back to the times of high unemployment and his personal practice of exaggerations, playing touchy-feely with the ladies, and verbal miscues when he was “a gaffe machine” (his own words).

“Like we used to be”? Does that mean being controlled by the Washington Deep Swamp, where Biden has been a fixture for 44 years? Or does he mean he will be Obama 2.0? Or maybe he wants to take us back to 1994 when he wrote the crime bill “which led to the mass incarceration of black men”, the memory of which leaves some African-Americans uneasy. Or, we could re-visit Biden’s dismal record in 1975 on racial quotas and the school busing crisis.

Even better, let’s go back to the 36 years Biden was in Congress, when he voted over and over to spend all the money that all of us paid into our Social Security program to fund our own retirement and disabilities. Yep, instead of investing our lifetime payments of Social Security taxes so the retirement fund would grow, Biden and Congress spent it all. Now, Biden considers social security payments to be “entitlements”, when they really are a return of our money we all paid into the social security fund during our working years.

Biden is the classic politician who “kicked the can down the road” during his whole political life, saddling future generations with the financial costs of liberal pet projects and giveaways. Biden borrowed against America’s future; and such borrowing must be paid back by our children and grandchildren long after Biden passes from the political scene. The people who will repay the borrowed money never consented to do that. But I will bet Biden, who has no conception of restraint, has nary an ounce of shame for what he has done. Columnist George Will has a name for it, though: decadence.

Since this is his third run for president, Biden hopes that three times is a charm. His first run was in 1988, short-lived when he was caught “plagiarizing speeches from a British politician”. But if he is successful this time in his quest for power, you can bet big money that most of his proposals as president will not only heap confiscatory taxes on all of us to pay for his entitlement proposals. Of greater alarm and danger, the America that Biden wants to take us back to is an America besieged by wealth redistribution, political correctness, identity politics, a stagnant economy from high taxes, more regulations and low economic growth , divisiveness, and a looming threat to The American Way.

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.