A large portion of the country received a letter from the IRS last week. In the letter, the Biden administration bragged about the COVID relief checks that most of us received. What the letter didn’t mention was the spike in inflation that was reported in April.
Our government has a propensity for overspending during the best of times. Unfortunately, COVID provided an excuse for an unprecedented number of trillion-dollar-plus spending bills. As a result, our national debt currently stands at 28T dollars – that’s over $85,000 of debt for every man, woman, and child in America. In real terms, that means a family of four is making interest payments on $340,000 of debt each year, through their taxes. They’re effectively making another house payment with their taxes, just to support runaway government spending.
Alarmingly, all of these special spending bills are above and beyond the federal budget. When the government spends more money than it has, it has to make more – either by printing it, or borrowing it. When more money is arbitrarily pumped into the economy, the money already in the economy goes down in value. And just like that, we’ve got inflation.
In April of this year, inflation hit 4.2% -- the sharpest spike since 2008. The result is that our income and savings can now buy 4.2% less (goods and services) than it could last year. But it’s actually worse than that. The published inflation number doesn’t account for increases in gasoline, electricity, natural gas, and food. Therefore, the actual inflation felt by consumers is somewhere north of the figure published by the government. Unless every American gets a pay raise equal to the actual inflation, their purchasing power is actually going down each year.
Government spending and the resulting debt is not an abstract concept – it has an impact on our standard of living every day. The burden of inflation and national debt threatens both the short-term and long-term welfare of our families. This burden leaves every American with less money for:
- Life’s necessities
- Leisure pursuits
- Retirement
Polling has shown that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of reducing federal spending. Unfortunately, regardless of which party is in power, spending has continued to increase. It’s one of those government problems which we have been unable to fix at the ballot box. The time is ripe for an Article V Convention of States to propose an amendment imposing fiscal responsibility on the Federal Government.
