The Biden Disaster
Things were not great when Biden took office. The nation was just coming out of a pandemic. What we needed was an “Obama like” slow growth economy combined with a Trump’s energy, immigration, and foreign policies.
Instead, Biden spent trillions of dollars creating massive demand for an economy that simply was not ready and so we got inflation instead. Obama spending to stimulate the economy and bolster the financial sector in order to weather the Great Recession adapted a set of policies that stretched out the recovery (not necessarily ideal at that time, but such policies would have been perfect in 2021).
At the same time, Biden’s energy policies contributed to cost-based energy inflation, when what we needed an all-energy policy to help the economy get back on track without government spending. Any surplus energy supplies could have been easily sold into Europe. Biden’s immigration policy created a massive increase in both unskilled labor competing for jobs thus holding down low wage jobs, a housing shortage in affordable housing driving up rents, and a huge increase in demand for government and social services. Trump’s immigration policies would have avoided these impacts.
I actually like most of Biden’s foreign policy decisions, the problem he is not clear at the beginning and so Putin thought he could invade and conquer Ukraine before the US would respond. Iran felt empowered to test the US resolve in the Middle East. China is saber rattling in Asia. Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan might have been the right policy, but the execution was poor. Trump had that “crazy” advantage. Foreign leaders especially our enemies did not know what he would do and so chose not to test him.
Now we have a President, who appears to be experiencing a rapid loss in cognitive function, no matter how much people deny it. I don’t think Biden was running the country before, it was largely being down by his staff, but now it's obvious and that creates problems, since the reason we elect a President and not an “Office of the President” is because we need a leader who, when necessary, can make instant decisions.
We have a spending problem which the CBO says is unsustainable. We can’t tax our way out of the problem, since doing so would crush the economic growth we need to grow our taxes. Democrats are afraid to cut spending, since they sold the future for votes today. The Fed and Treasury are watching our debt service climb towards a trillion annually. At this point, I don’t think anyone can save the country from going through a deep restructuring, that includes significant drops in spending even if on the surface they are masked by inflation and that sadly will hurt the poor more than any other group.
Inflation will force people to keep working since they can’t rely on the purchasing power of their retirement savings to keep up with the cost of living. Government will have to cut discretionary spending dramatically. We simply cannot afford all the government workers and salaries will have to be frozen. This is something “the Swamp” will fight tooth and nail over. Regulations will have to be cut like dramatically… hopefully the focus will be on the unnecessary ones, but I suspect some of the good regulations will be cut to prove all regulations are necessary.
We are heading down a bad road… not everything is his fault. He just made it worse…
