By John J. Duncan Jr.

duncanj@knoxfocus.com

CNBC published a report at the end of the year that said middle- and lower-income people spent about $3500 more for the same products in 2021 that they had bought in 2020.

This was from the highly-respected Penn Wharton Budget Model Analysis, not from some partisan Republican group.

There have been numerous reports that inflation is running at a 40-year high thanks to the Biden Administration and Democrat control of Congress.

The national debt has jumped about 6 ½ trillion dollars just in the last two years to a mind-boggling 29 trillion dollars.

When President Reagan left office in 1989, the national debt was $2.9 trillion and it took the country over 200 years to get to that level.

I thought then that the only reason people did not get upset about three trillion dollars in debt was that no one can humanly comprehend how much even one trillion dollars is.

Now the problem has exploded, and the areas where Democrats remain popular are in the wealthiest precincts in and around large cities, in poor minority areas where most depend on government handouts, on university campuses, and with federal bureaucrats.

Six of the 10 wealthiest counties in the U.S. are suburban counties surrounding Washington D.C. Wealthy liberals seem to love spending other people’s money while holding onto their own, i.e., Warren Buffett, Nancy Pelosi and many others.

And liberals have shown that they do not really care what happens to our middle class as long as they stay in power.

Witness the shutdown and masks and vaccine mandates on our own people while letting several million flood in here from almost every country without being tested, vaccinated, or required to wear masks.

They also showed how little they care for Americans by putting up illegal immigrants in very nice hotels, feeding them, and then flying them in the middle of the night all over the country so that our people would not know what was happening.

Even just a little common sense and intelligence would tell you that spending trillions you did not have was going to cause big inflation.

In an interview with one of the largest investors in crypto currency, he said we usual printed about 10% new money each year to accommodate the usually increase in population and inflation and to replace damaged currency.

However, he said this past year, we had printed 34% more. All this insane spending and printing of much more money has made the dollars we now have worth less.

Inflation is a tax that hits hardest on the very people Joe Biden said in his campaign he was not going to tax. Those on the Left always say raise corporate taxes, never seeming to realize or admit these taxes are always paid by ordinary people in the form of higher prices.

The ABC national news on Jan 1st carried a report about “sticker shock” in the grocery stores.

If Congress keeps spending as it has over the last two years, people will soon wish we had today’s “shocking” prices back.

I went to a meeting around 1990 in Washington in which the speaker from Argentina said inflation got so bad there in the late 80s that grocery stores had to raise their prices every four hours.

Argentina at that time was considered the best educated country in South America.

You should read in Eric Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer about the horrendous inflation in Germany in the 1920s, and Germany was the best-educated country in the world then.

If Republicans don’t get sizeable majorities in the mid-term elections and bring their ridiculous spending under control, we will fall on harder times than this nation has ever had.