In “The Wall Street Journal” on Thursday, May 20, 2021, an extremely pertinent and timely op/ed was published. Authors were Mr. Phil Gramm, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and a visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute, Senator Scott of Florida, Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, with contributions from Mr. Mike Solon.
I will summarize this important piece and hope and pray that Democrats will listen.
Inflation is rearing its ugly head. The broad money supply (called M2) grew by 24.6% over the last year, “a postwar high,” more than twice the rate it grew in 1979 before inflation reached 13.4% in 1979. During the China Virus, there was good reason, not now (my words.)
Mr. Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary and economic advisor to Presidents Obama and Clinton, stated that “the Biden stimulus” would be “the least responsible macroeconomic policies we’ve had in the last 40 years.”
There is flagrant spending stemming from “fiscal and monetary stimulus not seen since the Civil War. (About $6 trillion Biden administration “stimulus, relief and infrastructure bills.”)
A perceptive observation was rendered as follows: “Historically in America, the best healthcare, housing, transportation, nutrition, and childcare program was a job. If you give people things they typically get from a job, don’t be surprised when they don’t take a job.” My words, these non-job takers are very apt to lose their self-respect, self-esteem, and be subject to all sorts of addictions.
This borders on the ridiculous; “the Biden administration also asks Americans to believe that it can raise income, corporate, and death taxes, smother the private sector with regulations, kill the fossil fuel industry and fill the regulatory agencies with activists fundamentally hostile to the nation’s economic system and it will have no effect on economic performance.”
Solutions: Stop spending, end Biden stimulus on September 30, 2021, saving $710 billion, sooner possibly $1 trillion, repeal the enhanced unemployment benefits and reinstate the Clinton-era work requirements for welfare, limit the debt ceiling to 100% of gross domestic product.
To sum it up, a truism, “government can’t give us something for nothing.”
