In the bizarro world where Joe Biden’s grasp on economic reality collides with his son Hunter’s recreational and professional slitherings, the recent infrastructure bill vote paints a Night Gallery-esque gouache of Joe leaving Hunter at home alone for the weekend with the nation’s checkbook sitting on the kitchen counter.
Though that spending bill and the one that will follow may not literally (as far as we know) be hookers, crystal carafes of blow and influence bribes masquerading as art purchases, by the time all’s said and done the impact on the American people may in fact be similar.
Anyone who filled up their tank with gasoline last week at $3 a gallon while remembering $1.85 gas just last year understands inflation, and they know why Kansas Senators Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran are being hailed as heroes for standing up to the financial insanity of the Democrats’ socialist spending agenda last week.
Marshall and Moran voted in the minority on Tuesday against U.S. Senate passage of Biden’s Christmas-in-August $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill. It was named under the presumption that “infrastructure” should somehow include things like climate change and electric school buses and passenger trains no one uses anymore and free Internet service for poor people so they can Tik-Tok on their already government-supplied cell phones.
It’s been described as wartime level spending without the war – which in the end will rob far more Americans than it ever benefits and for a longer period of time – by raising prices and effectively shrinking our paychecks.
If you haven’t noticed, that paycheck shrink is already underway according to national financial measures – and gasoline’s just the most apparent one we all feel. Flooding the economy with increasing amounts of debt-backed currency has more risks than just higher prices. After massive amounts of money were shoveled into the American economy the past year through Covid relief, average prices paid by consumers for basic goods spiked higher in June than at any time since 2008 – and stayed more than 5 percent higher than a year ago in July.
The impact to most of us feels like more than 5 percent. You’ve seen what’s happened to the price of a pound of hamburger or a can of beans or a frozen pizza.
What’s more, the infrastructure bill Marshall and Moran tried to save us from is just the appetizer for the full course of Bernie Sanders-inspired economic colitis to come. The sequel is a $3.5 trillion Frankenstein spending bill cobbled up out of once dead and buried socialist buffoonery like free college, “lawful permanent status for qualified immigrants” (code for turning southern border crashers into Democrat voters) and billions more poured into wind farms and solar power which don’t work when the weather changes and only survive on government subsidy and corporate tax credit gluttony anyway.
Like Wind and Solar, so much of these bills is designed to grease the palms of crony unions and special interests heading up dead or go-nowhere industries or ideologies that, though irrelevant by modern standards, are still clung to as cash cows by Democrats. Passenger rail service? Really? Democrats want to dump billions into a 200 year-old technology which stopped being financially solvent in the country the first time three people rode in the same airplane together? U.S. passenger rail’s traditional financial debacle is rivaled only by its off-the-rails operational incompetence. My wife and I took an Amtrak to Winter Park in 1993 for a ski trip. We got back last Wednesday.
America has guys building their own spaceships for Pete’s sake – and with their own money. Why spend money on passenger rail that the government effectively has to pay people to use?
All that spending, for anyone actually watching the federal credit card statement, is adding up. The balance is now crowding $30 trillion. And if you really don’t understand the danger of inflation and its impact on the economy and on the financial faith the world puts in the U.S. and the disaster that kind of nervousness can cause, go back and Wiki the year 2008.
Immune from any type of oversight, Hunter Biden’s antics will in the end only harm himself and his family while confirming the “I told you so” of liberal political privilege. It’s frightening for the nation to watch the party in power behave like its most derelict fortunate son.
Truth is, there’s only so much that responsible leaders in the political minority can do to hold off Biden’s economic dumpster fire until the 2022 elections return the nation to more fiscal sanity. Moran and Marshall did what they could, and we applaud them.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.