I'm John Bess with my colleague Elizabeth Peek of the hill of Fox News of Fox Business

commenting on the State of the Union message and as I understand it that night and in subsequent days we

learned that the Biden administration is proposing in the second term to spend 7.1 trillion.

I thought that that might be wrong, so I checked it as best I could.

Liz, is that number correct? Is that what there...

Is that the general understanding of the spending for the second term?

Well, yes, but you know, let's take this with a grain of salt.

I mean, this was, I think the State of the Union address is very much a campaign address and this is a little bit of

chicken in every pot type of wish list that Joe Biden came up with which is not

so unusual in a state of the Union address but you know I think I think voters

forgetting Joe Biden's age forgetting all the indictments against Donald

Trump and so forth the critical issue in America today

is how big do we want our government to be?

Do we want the government taking an ever larger footprint

in the economy? And that is what has been happening and COVID really

put that progression already underway started I would argue by Obama with Obamacare, it really put that on steroids. So for a period of time,

everybody was happy to see the government guaranteeing loans of all kinds, guaranteeing employment, paying for people's

rent, excusing people's student loans, etc.

So now the issue is are we going to backtrack from that or are we just

going to plow forward allowing the government, as I say, to take an ever larger slice

of the economic pie.

I would hope that Republicans mound a very fierce defense of the private economy.

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