Without a doubt, Bidenomics has been a disaster for American families, with no relief in sight as the November election approaches. Yet, Joe Biden and his supporters have done everything they can to gaslight and spin their economic disasters and the country’s overall economic malaise into a cause for celebration.
One cheerleading Democrat after another has tried to manufacture an alternate reality. Pay no attention to your skyrocketing bills. Never mind the tech layoffs. Inflation? What inflation? Perhaps the most outlandish spin so far comes courtesy of Brian Beutler, a senior editor at the New Republic, in a Substack essay titled, “Biden Beat Trumpflation and the Trump Crime Wave.”
Nobody wants to inherit this economy.
Beutler tries to bend reality from the start. “Trumpflation” — really? When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, inflation was running about 1.4% annually. In fact, under Donald Trump’s tenure, then-Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said at one point that inflation was too low. And in May 2021, after Trump was out of office, Yellen, now helming the Treasury Department, said she didn’t see any inflation problem ahead.
While year-over-year inflation measures peaked under Biden in June 2022 at around 9.1%, cumulative increases since he took office are nearly 20% as measured by the Consumer Price Index, with the real impact felt by consumers even more severe.
Speaking of his liberal friends, Beutler laments, “I don’t know any who doubt my premise: Republicans would love to inherit this economy. They’d brag about how it became good the moment they took charge, and they’d quickly reap the political spoils.” We have already established that the author and Democrats are both decoupled from reality, but wanting to inherit this economy? My goodness.
Nobody wants to inherit this economy.
Biden has not only fueled massive inflation but also embellished economic growth figures, which are now declining, with the first quarter GDP coming in nearly a percentage point lower than expected.
Growth in large part has come a result of the government running massive deficits. The U.S. deficit-to-GDP is currently around double the historic average. It is highly unusual for deficits to be that large when the economy is showing growth. More tax receipts should cut deficits. In an unfortunate turn of events, the Biden administration has done the opposite — it used deficit spending to create growth, something that has been done at an incredible cost to taxpayers, with interest rates near 15-year highs.
This has created a national debt nearing $35 trillion with interest expense at a $1.7 trillion run-rate. If nothing shifts in terms of spending or interest rates, debt service will soon become the largest individual government expenditure.
It gets worse, believe it or not. The Biden administration has weaponized the U.S. dollar, and we are now facing an acceleration of central banks and governments trying to reduce their dependence on the dollar as a reserve currency, which will ultimately make financing the U.S. government more expensive.
Americans are also contending with record-high household debt and a dwindling personal savings rate, coming in at less than half of the historic average for the first three quarters of the year, ending March 2024 at 3.2%.
On top of that, key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, including the lower individual tax rates, begin to expire at the end of 2025.
Whoever wins in November will need to contend with addressing that as well.
While living in a fantasy world is the Democratic Party’s strong suit, let me say that nobody, and I mean no one, should want to inherit this fiscal mess. That is reality, and there is no way to spin it.