A hundred seventy-five dollars a month.
That’s the hidden tax the average American household is paying for the Biden economy.
Some of this is indeed “transitory,” as Federal Reserve officials like to say. The COVID-19 pandemic did a number on supply chains around the world. Workers in Taiwan couldn’t make semiconductors at home, for instance, and are now racing to catch up with worldwide demand. That demand drives up the prices of cars, electronics and more.
But President Biden and Democrats have exacerbated the problem. They extended unemployment bonuses for months, keeping millions out of the workforce and flooding the economy with cash. Eight million are out of work, even as there are 10 million job openings.
Just pay employees more, say the Twitterati. But when you’re a small business already squeezed by the rising costs of goods, taxes and ever-changing government COVID regulations, how can you possibly succeed? The only way is raising prices. It’s all become a feedback loop that hits your grocery bill.
Now is the time for the government to step back and let the economy find normalcy again. Suppliers get back up and running, people return to jobs, prices stabilize.
Except that’s not what Biden is doing. He wants to spend another $5 trillion, as if the economic laws of inflation don’t exist anymore. All that government money will drive up prices even more.
And take just one proposed program: a $6.8 billion initiative to give low-income, first-time homeowners up to $20,000 for a down payment. Not a loan — free money. As demand increases even more than today, the price of homes — and then of rents — will skyrocket nationwide. Not our problem! say the Democrats. Nothing spending even more money down the road can’t solve.
Biden likes to argue that the tax increases to pay for all this spending will hit only the rich. But inflation is a tax, a merciless one that’s already hitting Americans hard.
