“I’m sick of this stuff!” barked an angry and exasperated President Joe Biden. “The American people think the reason for inflation is government spending more money! It’s simply not true!”
Two days later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doubled down on Biden’s claim, attacking those pointing to Democrats’ galactic spending as the main inflation culprit and insisting, incredibly, that “the government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt! It is not inflationary.” Pelosi even blamed rapidly rising prices on Vladimir Putin – even though the Russian dictator invaded Ukraine just weeks ago on Feb. 24, while “Bidenflation” has been ravaging the country since shortly after Biden took office in January 2021.
As usual, whatever America’s progressive ruling elites fervently claim is the truth can reliably be assumed to be precisely the opposite of the truth.
In reality, under Biden, the federal bureaucracy has spent radically more money than it has taken in through taxes or borrowed, and has therefore pumped enormous amounts of new money into the U.S. economy via the Federal Reserve. During the same period, the administration has created massive economic dislocation by ruinous and politically motivated pandemic lockdowns, encouraged people not to work by offering endless government “stimulus” programs, and has purposely crippled America’s huge oil, gas and coal industries in almost cult-like obedience to a bizarre environmental ideology that claims the world will become uninhabitable for humans in a few years if fossil fuels aren’t completely eliminated.
Do all that, and you’re guaranteed to get sky-high prices, not just for fuel, but for everything.
Today’s actual inflation rate, despite the government’s official rate being pegged at 7.9% as of the end of February, is arguably double that percentage. The official rate is calculated in large part based on the consumer price index. But economists note that the CPI, configured by the same federal government that is creating the current inflation for its own benefit, purposely underestimates the rate of inflation. After all, gasoline isn’t the only commodity that has skyrocketed to its highest price ever: The price of construction materials in the U.S. increased well over 20% during 2021, the retail price of beef is up 21%, corn is up 39%, wheat 37%, coffee 108%, and so on. Americans today are paying far more than an annualized 7.9% price increase for virtually everything they are purchasing.
Historically, whether considering hyperinflation nightmares like Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and Venezuela, or societies plagued with less extreme inflation, the cause is always the same: A lawless government wants to spend money it does not have for the sake of increasing its power. So it simply prints much more money (however complex and deliberately obfuscating the mechanism it employs for creating, “borrowing” and spending the new “money” into circulation), which naturally dilutes the value of the rest of the money out in society – the wealth people actually earned and saved through years of hard work and personal sacrifice.
Inflation, as legendary economist Thomas Sowell put it, “is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.”
President Ronald Reagan, whose moral clarity and strong leadership brought the Carter-era inflation era to an end, expressed this truth more colorfully: “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.”
“Mugger?” “Armed robber?” “Hit man?” Was Reagan joking or exaggerating about inflation and those who create it?
No. It’s the very nature of corrupt oligarchs, whose goal is always their own wealth, power and privilege, to exploit and essentially steal from the middle class, whom they pretend to represent and care about, but secretly detest.
Why detest them? Because the middle class – which works hard and sacrifices and raises families and contributes to society and obeys the nation’s laws – is the repository of goodness, Judeo-Christian morality, love of country and honor for their forbears, including those who fought, bled and died to protect their nation. The would-be oligarchs, the “great reset” crowd, the global socialist dreamers not only don’t care about all of that, they have contempt for “the peasants.”
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