Much of the spending has been propounded in the name of economic recovery from Covid. As if the government were a group of benevolent humanitarians, it makes bold promises of help and recovery from the economic downturn -while spending other people’s money and then taking the credit for it.
In the words of Henry Hazlitt, “The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else.” In line with this simple truth, the very same federal government proclaiming that it will “build back better” has put forth a tax agenda that threatens the jobs and industry that actually bring real prosperity.
The higher taxes that are necessary to pay for such a budget are bad enough, but there is more to such a budget than meets the eye. One need not be an economic analyst to recognize that something is amiss in the American economy.
A simple glance at the rising prices across all sorts of sectors has left consumers with a much higher bill at the gas pump, the grocery store, and the car lot. Companies across the country are warning that prices will continue to rise as a result of inflation. While the government is able to meet its spending goals, it is the taxpayer that ultimately foots the bill for the inflation that results.
To put this in perspective, recall the fact that this inflation is occurring in addition to the high taxes. As if the high taxes themselves weren’t enough to satisfy the federal government’s insatiable appetite to spend other people’s money, they tax the citizens and lower the value of the citizens’ incomes by printing more money and lowering the value of the dollar.
While taxes might be “the front door” for the government to put more of the citizens’ incomes into it its aggressive spending agendas, inflation is the result of such policies. It is “the back door” that government uses to make the citizens foot the bill if their tax money can’t even fund the runaway spending proposals.
The enormous federal spending threatens the economic well-being of Americans by increasing their tax burden and then additionally lowering the value of their hard-earned dollars. Ronald Reagan’s quip about government spending stands true: "We could say they spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money."