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Most Americans probably remember the years after 2020 as a time of wildly expensive governance and maddeningly ill-considered Covid overreactions that lasted long after the pandemic and will haunt our children with massive federal debt and reduced educational aptitude. But Senate Democrats look back on that period as the good old days. In fact they recall the recklessness of those years with such fondness that they’ve shut down much of the government and vowed not to reopen without an agreement to continue one of the most destructive policies of that disastrous era. In the Journal this week Ge Bai writes about the two inflation-inducing Biden spending blowouts that enabled this policy of subsidizing ObamaCare insurance plans for people who are nowhere close to being poor: In March 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the American Rescue Plan temporarily extended premium subsidy eligibility to those with incomes above 400% of the federal poverty level, allowing people at any income level to receive subsidies originally intended for those with modest means. In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act extended those subsidies through December 2025. Ms. Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins, describes some of the people middle-class taxpayers are forced to subsidize: A family of four in Arizona making $600,000, a married couple in West Virginia making $580,000, and a single individual in Vermont making $180,000 all qualify for subsidies. As if this situation isn’t absurd enough, this Biden subsidy for the affluent is at its core a bailout for Obama-Biden health policy. Ms. Bai continues:
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