Some days ago, I pondered whether Nancy Pelosi had gotten drunk before a recent presser. I’m starting to feel a lot better about that theory, after her latest performance.
The Speaker of the House had some deep, riveting thoughts on the federal budget deficit. For example, did you know that government spending actually lowers the deficit? I know, wonders never cease.
This is actually a talking point that has clearly gone out to the White House as well. On Friday, Joe Biden slammed Americans for blaming government spending for the current inflation crisis, claiming that massive, dollar-printing boondoggles like the American Rescue Plan have had no impact.
Regardless of who is saying it, though, it’s absolutely a false contention. The federal government spent $6.82 trillion in 2021 under Joe Biden. That clocks in at around 50 percent more than the United States was spending pre-pandemic (2019 spending was $4.4 trillion). To suggest that blowing that much funny money into the economy isn’t inflationary is so absurd as to call into question the pronouncer’s mental sanity.
Besides, we don’t have to wonder about this topic. With inflation now at 7.9 percent year-over-year, it is not debatable that the exploding federal budget is the major variable in increasing prices compared to the pre-pandemic years. Nothing else has changed. Yes, demand has increased following the lockdowns, but there was high demand prior to the pandemic–and inflation still remained between 1-2 percent.
As to the notion that the government spending being called for by Democrats reduces the deficit, that’s also totally false. The CBO scored the Biden-Pelosi agenda as adding several hundred billion dollars to the deficit, which was already super-sized from the prior pandemic spending mentioned above. To the extent that the deficit is being reduced at all right now, it’s only because spending is slowly returning to what are still record highs compared to pre-pandemic budgets.
For any politician to claim that government spending lowers the deficit, when it still remains at astronomical levels, is insane. It’s gaslighting of the highest order. Democrats are going to have to come up with a better way to explain why commonly bought items are so expensive right now than pretending we can spend our way out of the inflation boom the nation is suffering under. Of course, no better explanation exists because to suggest such is nonsense, so you get the outright lies Pelosi is pushing here.
Will any of the fact-checkers take her on? Of course not. They haven’t even bothered to fact-check Biden’s comments on inflation I mentioned earlier in this article. Regardless, I don’t think Pelosi’s “crazy aunt” act is very convincing for most Americans, no matter how the media covers it.