Former Vice President Mike Pence uses a National Review Online column to take aim at the current president’s budget proposals.

President Biden is releasing a plan that he claims will trim $3 trillion off the deficit and save Medicare from financial collapse. In reality, what we already know about the president’s plan indicates it will likely be a mishmash of shell games, budget gimmicks, and massive tax hikes that will harm economic growth while merely delaying Medicare’s insolvency by a few more years.

On its current trajectory, Medicare will be unable to make good on its bills in 2029, triggering automatic cuts that will slash health-care benefits for millions of elderly Americans who rely on the program. The president and his team of economists and Ph.D.s want to kick the can down the road and let others deal with the long-lasting structural problems that have plagued the program for decades. Is this really the best we can do?

If Biden truly wanted to get us out of the financial hole we find ourselves in, there is a much simpler solution available to him: Stop digging. That is, Biden could single-handedly eliminate $1.3 trillion from the deficit by repealing the costly executive orders issued during his first two years, especially his unconstitutional student-loan-forgiveness plan, which remains on hold pending a Supreme Court decision. Instead, Biden is intent on adding more than $1 trillion to America’s growing mountain of debt.

The reason Biden is doomed to fail at reducing the deficit is that he refuses to acknowledge the heart of the problem: It’s not that we tax too little, it’s that we spend too much. Yet Biden and his team refuse to cut one dime of spending.

With tax collections already at an all-time high, there is simply not much additional revenue that can be squeezed out of American taxpayers.