As if “Bidenomics” hasn’t done enough for us already by nearly doubling our gasoline prices from just a few years ago and making us take out a second mortgage to buy a ribeye at the grocery store…
Now the genius “let’s borrow money and give it away to everybody and his dog” plan enacted by these gifted intellectuals has jacked up interest payments for cities in Kansas who borrowed money to pay off ticket-scalper rates for energy back in the big winter storm of 2021, sticking them with millions of dollars more in interest.
Which means of course that you, dear homeowner and utility consumer, will eventually be paying the bill – that is, if you want to heat your home and keep the lights turned on.
Time out. There are moments when the totality of the absolutely awful level of government Americans are enduring these days sweeps over us like a sewage tsunami. Out of control prices for goods and food we buy every day; skyrocketing interest rates employed to slow the inflationary inferno (tried to borrow money to buy a car lately?); millions of illegal immigrants pouring through a border our government won’t defend; the murderous debacle of incompetence in Afghanistan; a lying FBI and an IRS that looks the other way at a bribery scheme involving the president and his son; government collusion with social media platforms to censor the speech of those it disagrees with; the incitement of a sex war targeting women’s identity and sovereignty; a president who’s more concerned that you have a gas stove in your kitchen than he is about actually fixing the problems he’s created.
Do you ever feel like the last three years has just been one big joke, and the American voters are the punchline?
Indeed, the champions of “Bidenomics” have once again cut a financially devastating swath extending all the way to rural Kansas. This one tracks back to the Coldpocalypse of 2021 – the brutal February cold snap (probably Trump’s fault) that lasted most of a week and ran from Canada down to Mexico across the plains states. Natural gas and electric suppliers stuck a gun in the ribs of utilities and jacked up their spot rates more than 600 percent in some cases. This fleecing and price gouging of utilities might as well have been a cocaine drop in the Biden White House for all the good investigators have done in rooting out any legal accountability for it.
Consequently, municipal utilities in Kansas had to spend nearly all their gas and electric budgets for the whole year in that one week. State legislators jumped in to help by writing up a low-interest loan program the cities could borrow from that guaranteed a quarter of one percent interest – unless rates went up past 2.25 – which was unheard of because heck, market rates were of no concern. Then of course came Biden’s drunken sailor spending for his enviro-socialist agenda under the guise of Covid relief. The Fed raised rates to put the brakes on the resulting skyrocketing inflation, and small cities in Kansas learned yet a new lesson in “Bideonomics.”
The interest on those municipal utility loans suddenly went from .25 percent to 2.68 percent – a tenfold increase to what those cities had planned in their budgets for debt service on those loans. This was the case in Kansas, but municipal and small private utilities all across the midwest probably are experiencing some similar dynamic – all because of “Bidenomics.”
Like the rest of Biden’s trickle-down disasters, it will be state and local governments that will have to solve this problem. Cities holding cash reserves will likely look at paying off those notes to avoid the higher interest rates that will last at least for the foreseeable future. In Kansas’ case it will be up to the Kansas Legislature to help those that don’t have the cash to pay. Regardless, the money that would have been spent on city streetwork, curb and gutters, libraries, police departments – it’ll all be gone thanks to Biden’s genius.
How much more “Bidenomics” can this country withstand?
–Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.