There have been many things that have classified Joe Biden’s presidency so far — failing in Afghanistan, shutting down the keystone pipeline, vaccine mandates, the border crisis, but even with this record number of failures, Joe Biden’s economic policy still is a defining feature of his presidency. His overspending has led to mass inflation that is obviously damaging the economy, and he has almost reached the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just stop with inflation, there are plenty of other problems as well. Joe Biden spent trillions of dollars on many things, but chief among them were government handouts for individuals during the tyrannical Covid shutdowns.
These handouts didn’t just go to people who had lost their jobs because of the government-enforced shutdowns, but anyone who earned less than $75,000 got a check. That check, along with increased spending on other programs, and existing unemployment programs made the prospect of doing nothing for a living quite attractive for some people. At first, this may seem like a good thing to some people. People who don’t want to work get to have easy lives, and people who do work will be paid more because of the increased demand for labor. While it is true that certain groups benefit in the short term, the stimulus bills hurt everyone in the long run.
This is because the stimulus bill caused inflation, and that just means that the average price of goods went up. The prices go up, but the value of those goods do not. This is bad because people’s savings lose purchasing power. The stimulus check gave people a little money to spend, but it robbed them of far more purchasing power because of inflation. Many people also did not work during that time because they were getting government handouts, so they were even more reliant on their savings for financial stability. Of course, Joe Biden doesn’t want to cause inflation as it looks bad politically, and no politician does. That means they want to avoid as much inflation as possible while still getting more money to spend on buying votes. So the federal government can’t just print more money all the time — it is the quickest way of inducing inflation.
Printing money makes every old dollar present in the economy worth less in terms of purchasing power. If this is done slowly, it is still immoral as it is still just essentially taking people’s money through a different means, but it doesn’t have drastic consequences in the short term. If, however, hyperinflation occurs, then it has serious and immediate consequences. If you don’t believe that your money will be worth substantially less tomorrow than it is today, then you will spend all your money. Unfortunately, no one wants to sell you anything because they don’t have money they know will be worth less tomorrow, either. With hyper-inflation, this cycle just continues until money is completely useless. Because of that, they try to limit how much money they print in any year so that the effects of inflation are slower and more manageable.
Politicians still have to buy votes with handouts, and that can get extremely expensive. They came up with a solution to their problem of not having an infinite supply of money. If they didn’t want to destroy the US dollar, they could just borrow money from other countries. Politicians love this because it gives them more spending money without causing inflation that could cost them their jobs. This is why the current national debt is well above 28 trillion dollars. There was one measure put in place so that the debt could not be used this way — the debt ceiling. The ceiling is simply the limit that the country may borrow each year, but Congress can raise the limit whenever they want.
This is where it gets interesting. Traditionally, the debt ceiling is raised each year at the President’s request, but Congress does not have to agree. They can refuse to raise the debt ceiling, and it looks like Republicans in the Senate are going to do exactly that, and the government is getting close to the current ceiling. This has many benefits. Obviously, the federal government has to stop borrowing money, but even better than that, they will lose the ability to implement any new programs at all. Whenever Biden gives an executive order or signs a law, it will need to be funded. Without the ability to borrow more money, Biden can’t implement any of his new agenda items unless Congress pulls money from existing programs or raises taxes.
