posted April 11, 2021 02:02 PM            

President Joe Biden speaks as he gets his weekly economic briefing in the Oval Office.
President Joe Biden is on a tear, as in tearing up arrangements that were achieving their objectives. His early results are disastrous, writes Michael Goodwin.

The sage advice that “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is older than Joe Biden, but apparently he never heard of it. Or doesn’t think much of it.

The president is on a tear, as in tearing up arrangements that were achieving their objectives. His early results are disastrous.

In an act of astonishing foolishness, Biden created a humanitarian and public safety crisis on our southern border by dismantling a successful policy structure that took years to achieve. In the Mideast, he looks determined to undo the Arab-Israeli alliance Donald Trump forged by returning to the failed policies Biden helped to implement in the Obama-Biden administration.

If that were all, it would be more than enough. But it’s not all.

Biden also wants to end the Senate filibuster and took the first step toward packing the Supreme Court. Those two moves are so destructive that even Sen. Mitt Romney, who usually saves his criticism for fellow Republicans, drew the line.

“My Democrat friends decry the last president for weakening our institutions with his words and behavior but they now cheer the effort to pack the Supreme Court and end the Senate filibuster, which would forever diminish institutions at our Republic’s foundation,” Romney wrote on Twitter.

The easy description of what Biden is up to, assuming he’s really calling the shots, is that he is simply the anti-Trump president. Whatever Trump did, Biden will undo it.

While that approach tugs at the heartstrings of the hate-Trumpers, it’s hardly a path to success.

Instead, it’s more like a child throwing a tantrum and breaking all his favorite toys. What’s he going to play with tomorrow?

Tomorrow has arrived, and how well Biden’s approach is working can best be seen at the border. The chaos in the migrant facilities overflowing with minors is mirrored in chaos at the White House.

The aide Biden tapped to be his “border czar,” Roberta Jacobson, announced Friday she is leaving at the end of the month. Although her appointment was to last only 100 days, the fact that someone in the White House believed this was a 100-day problem demonstrates magical thinking at best and sheer idiocy at worst.

Even the Biden bootlicking New York Times called her departure “striking” given the problems. It quoted Jacobson as claiming the system is moving toward “an immigration system that is humane, ­orderly and safe.”

Good grief. Only a committed virtue signaler could call it “humane, orderly and safe” when coyotes and sex traffickers brought nearly 30,000 unaccompanied minors to the border in just February and March. Caring for them is costing taxpayers $60 million a week.

Although the White House has kept the media in the dark, little snippets of the harsh reality reveal the daily depravity.

A 10-year-old Nicaraguan boy, crying and cold, was found wandering alone near the border in Texas, abandoned by human-trafficking “coyotes.” A video captured heartless fiends dropping two toddler girls off 14-foot fences into the US, where border guards rescued them.

Forbes reports that officials caught 172,000 migrants at the border last month, a 71 percent increase from February. Reports say as many as 1,000 others escape capture and enter illegally every day.

This is all on Joe Biden and his arrogant decision to break what Trump fixed, without a workable plan of his own.

First he ended the “Remain in Mexico” compact that kept asylum-seekers in Mexico, he stopped wall construction and said children traveling alone would be exempt from rules blocking most families and childless adults.

His implicit invitation to come was accepted by tens of thousands of migrants from Central American hellholes. The result is a new generation of illegal residents and “Dreamer” children that will make it impossible for any president to achieve a bipartisan solution.

Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to work with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries to stem the tide, but Harris has disappeared. She is keeping her distance from the problem and the media, a sign she doesn’t see any solutions and doesn’t want to be responsible for the failure.

Biden is doing something similar in the Mideast, including restoring hundreds of millions of dollars in annual subsidies to the Palestinians that Trump canceled. No doubt some American money again will pay the families of terrorists who kill or attack Israelis, and some will disappear into the secret bank accounts of corrupt Arab leaders. The United Nations relief agency, riddled with anti-Semites, will also get funded so it can continue the fiction that Palestinians remain refugees nearly 75 years after Israeli independence.

All this is prelude to Biden returning to the tired formula of “land for peace” even as four more Muslim nations started diplomatic relations with Israel without a resolution of the Palestinian issue. There is ­kosher food in Dubai, but instead of embracing a future built on new political realities, Biden is turning back the clock to a failed era.

That includes courting Iran, a ­theocracy committed to exporting terrorism. Already the president is offering to lift sanctions Trump imposed on oil exports if only the mullahs would make promises about nuclear enrichment they never ­intend to keep.

In Washington, Biden is using his wrecking ball to demolish institutions he served and defended for 40 years.

The filibuster he once said is essential he now calls a legacy of Jim Crow. He revered the Supreme Court but now reviles it.

One of his talking points is that radical change is needed because America is systemically racist. In the next breath he will say Americans are fundamentally good people. Which is it?

Because his moves are so confusing, Washington chin strokers are searching for a Biden Doctrine to explain it all.

Let me save them time. There is no doctrine because what Joe Biden is doing doesn’t make a whit of sense.
Harmful, spiteful ‘rich’ tax

A friend hit by the state’s tax hikes on high earners warns that Gov. Cuomo and lawmakers are harming New York. A Democrat, he wonders if there are any moderates who are not afraid of progressives. Here are highlights of his argument:

Florida has no state income tax, so if he moved there his after-tax income would be 33 percent higher.

Because people can now work remotely, private equity firms and hedge funds are moving south and investment banks are establishing beachheads in Miami and Palm Beach.

The exodus puts big-ticket philanthropy at risk, which would be a blow to New York’s cultural, educational and medical institutions.

My friend is angry because he believes the tax hikes were passed only out of spite toward the rich. But he’s also sad, saying: “I’ve lived here for six decades and I’ve never felt more unwanted and despised.”
‘Racist’ burden for ‘excluded’

Reader Stan Yellin notes the $2 billion “excluded workers fund” Albany created requires applicants to prove their identity. But wait, he asks, “Isn’t it racist to require an ID to receive payments?”