Joe Biden has been president for 100 days. Wednesday night he called for yet more government spending, on top of the trillions he has already called for and gotten Congress to pass.
All told, Biden has called for $6,000,000,000,000 in spending during his first 100 days in office, according to the New York Times. That’s six trillion dollars — a 6 with 12 zeroes following it like a flock of baby ducks.
Except baby ducks are cute and harmless. All those zeroes are not.
Divided by 100, Biden has asked America to spend $60,000,000,000 over and above ordinary spending — per day, over the course of his first 100 days. He’s showing no signs of slowing down and has no realistic plans to pay for it.
There’s simply no way for the media, let alone the average American citizen, to keep up with all this spending. It’s reached a level surpassing what’s comprehensible.
Broadly speaking, the COVID relief bills weren’t mostly about providing relief to Americans suffering from COVID lockdowns. The infrastructure bill isn’t mostly about repairing or building new infrastructure. We’re winding down wars (at least, until the consequences of that may force us to wind them right back up, as happened at the end of the Obama administration). Much, most, of Biden’s spending is unnecessary and wildly irresponsible. It’s packed with political buyoffs and giveaways.
Biden pledged to tax only Americans who make more than $400,000 per year. This was always an unsustainable and unbelievable promise. There simply are not enough Americans in that income level to pay for all of his spending, even if he confiscates every cent and every single thing they own. The wealthy know he won’t do that; they’ll see to it. They also never believed his $400,000 promise. Spread evenly across 330 million people, his plans amount to forcing each American to pay more than $18,000. That’s just to cover the spending he has called for in his first 100 days. We have a long, long way to go.
Reality is setting in. Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and his decision to order a moratorium on drilling on federal lands is contributing to the swift rise in energy prices since he took office. States reopening their economies is also contributing, as demand rises from the historic demand crash of 2020 when the economy was partially shut down to slow COVID’s spread.
Some of us have been predicting that the relentless printing of money to pay for unprecedented spending with no end in sight, plus tightening energy supplies, would result in energy prices rising, which would in turn feed inflation broadly across the media. Like predicting violent crime would rise with the defunding of police across the country, it was an easy prediction to make.
Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Coca-Cola have all warned that they’ll raise prices on many of their products as raw material costs rise. Plastic, paper, sugar, grain and other commodities are all getting more expensive as demand outpaces supply. Companies are also paying more for shipping as fuel costs rise and ports experience longer delays because of congestion.
The report notes that inflation arrives just as the economy returns partially to normal. This could be expected to some extent just because demand will rise. Biden’s policies will add to the pain and amount to a tax that will rob Americans of their savings and force them to work harder and longer just to break even.
Soda giant Coca-Cola has said it expects to raise prices to fight higher costs, while Procter & Gamble is raising prices for baby, feminine and adult care products.
U.S. consumer prices increased a sharp 0.6% in March, the biggest uptick since 2012, while inflation over the past year jumped 2.6%. Some of the increases have been anticipated by Wall Street as the economy improves and inflation increases with it. The pace and size of inflation increases still remains a concern.
America hasn’t seen real inflation since the Jimmy Carter years. Then, as now, statist policies dominated the federal government, and the projection of weakness fed perceptions of America’s inability to keep the peace around the world. Ronald Reagan ran against and defeated Carter and ushered in an economic renaissance that helped crush the Soviet Union.
But in the present case, we had the economic renaissance first, followed by shutdowns that badly damaged the economy, and a Carter-esque retread has been swept into office imposing statist ideas with unsustainable spending. China is not the Soviet Union; it’s far stronger economically and even more aggressive than Moscow tended to be. Thanks to globalist policies that put much of the world’s manufacturing power in China, that nuclear-armed communist state now has the world’s largest navy including three aircraft carriers — one on a par with our supercarriers — and recently commissioned three warships in a single day. China builds up while Biden instigates a politicization of our military which will surely weaken it, while his spending will weaken our economy and his stubborn emphasis on imposing critical race theory will divide the country.
Joe Biden may make Jimmy Carter seem like Reagan in comparison by the time he reaches 200 days in office.
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