During the global pandemic response that rocked our world in 2020, government spending was needed and occurred at record levels. Stimulus funds were pushed into the hands of Americans to spend on food, housing, and essentials to keep the economy limping along.
Yet the continued government spending at elevated levels is likened to giving drugs to an addict from 2021 to this very moment.
Americans are finally hearing economic evidence that honestly explains the continuing inflation, the pressures on American wages, and the dismal outlook because of the unseriousness in solving the problem.
In simple terms, things could get worse.
CNBC’s Kelly Evans provided a detailed analysis that stacked up evidence proving Americans are not imagining their financial pain and revealed government spending as the culprit.
For starters, Americans have endured a decline in income for the third consecutive year, according to the Wall Street Journal. This has occurred as the prices of food, energy, housing, transportation, medicine, and everything has increased each of those three years. Americans make less, pay more, and government policies favor government, not workers.
As the government has spent extravagantly on projects of all sorts putting hundreds of billions into the US economy as a stimulus, the simultaneous policy has been to make the cost of money, or interest rates on borrowing, to go up, and even eliminate lines of credit for small businesses to operate. This monetary policy correction is preventing homeownership and harming the wealth of the working class.
CNBC’s Evans noted, “The U.S. fiscal picture has been much worse than expected this year. The economic data have stopped getting noticeably better in recent weeks.” A response that has not been publicly promoted is now problematic, according the financial reporter’s analysis: “Markets are freaking out over the government’s fiscal problems. And we all know that might be the hardest thing for this country to try and solve.”
To bring the policy talk to the simple math, Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett, representing the Knoxville area in Congress, made it plain, “I don’t work for people in Congress; I work for the people of the Second District of Tennessee. And, overwhelmingly, the folks are tired of the fact that we take in over $5 trillion, and we spend $7 trillion…” addressing his recent votes against the continued emergency spending and vote to remove US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Burchett also lamented the fact that Congress fails to do their one constitutional job – pass a budget annually. “By law, we have one job and that is to pass 12 appropriations bills and a budget. We aren’t doing that, which is why we are $33 trillion in debt.”
Read those quotes to see the inexcusable spending and policy failures. The US Government has no money. It takes your taxes, collected from your paycheck and savings, and spends. The government currently spends with no budget. Instead, it operates in emergency spending using a credit card. And Americans are paying the high price for shameful, wasteful, undisciplined spending.