Sen. Hagerty warns of inflation woes: It's 'not transitory'
Tennessee Republican weighs in on the consequences of Democrats' spending plan.
In the 2003 romantic comedy "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," a women’s magazine editor tasks her star columnist with an experiment to see if she can do exactly that. The writer zeroes in on an unsuspecting guy, then tries to drive him so crazy with destructive behaviors that he bolts within a week and a half.
If the plotline feels familiar, it’s because we’re currently living a similar script.
President Biden seemingly has adapted that screenplay into "How to Lose a Country in 10 Months." Like the fictional writer, he zeroed in on his target – America – and is forcing so many destructive policies so fast that the country seems increasingly unmoored.
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The movie had a happy ending. This real-life drama will not.
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama identified his and the Left’s ultimate objective: the "fundamental transformation of the nation." By that, he meant moving the country away from its foundational principles of individual liberty, limited government and free market capitalism and toward a socialist, collectivist economic model and governance through a permanently installed Democrat majority.
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Everything Democrats do is geared to achieving that objective. Last week, when asked about Biden’s multitrillion-dollar spending proposals, White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted they were about "making fundamental change in our economy."
All Biden administration policies can be understood not in the traditional sense of "success" but in the radical context of remaking the country into an American-style socialist tyranny, atop which the leftist ruling class will sit forever.
In that context, the cascade of crises begins to make sense: they’re necessary steps in the transformation. The attendant chaos allows them to implement endless "emergency" policies that hand them ever-greater power and control at the expense of ever-dwindling individual freedom.
Consider their policy warpath over the past 10 months:
Prior to the pandemic, the economy under President Trump was firing on all cylinders, with growth strong, wages up and unemployment at or near historic lows for every demographic group. When the pandemic hit, Trump oversaw the execution of $4 trillion in economic relief, and when he left office, he handed Biden the fastest economic recovery on record.
Biden’s inherent weakness is a provocation, emboldening America’s enemies as they probe, advance and threaten us and our interests.
Biden has chosen to squander that robust recovery by pushing multitrillion-dollar spending sprees, racking up unprecedented debt, threatening higher taxes on most Americans and paying people more to stay home than work. Inflation, a hidden, regressive tax that disproportionately hurts the poor, working and middle classes, is at a 13-year high, with prices on everything from groceries to gas skyrocketing and heading higher.
Into this inflationary situation the Democrats want to inject an additional $5 trillion in spending, complete with new entitlements that will reach into the middle class, and as planned, expand a never-ending and irreversible dependence on government. If they get even a fraction of their desired spending, today’s stifling inflation will become oppressive.
Biden’s economic devastation has also led to a convulsive supply chain crisis, overwhelmed ports, a trucker shortage, and airline workers staging sickouts over his vaccine mandates.
Beyond the economy, tens of thousands of Americans responsible for keeping the rest of us safe and healthy – doctors, nurses, other medical professionals, police officers, firefighters, teachers, military personnel – are being fired for asserting medical freedom, throwing the labor market into greater disarray.
Biden’s inherent weakness is a provocation, emboldening America’s enemies as they probe, advance and threaten us and our interests. The southern border is a dangerous free-for-all of unchecked illegal immigration. The catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan has created a power vacuum being filled by the Taliban, ISIS, al Qaeda, China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran. It also makes our homeland more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, particularly when coupled with the wide open southern border.
Iran is marching toward a nuclear weapon. Russia enjoys a free hand to engage in energy extortion of our European allies thanks to Biden’s acquiescence to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And China remains unaccountable on everything from the origins of COVID-19 to its threats to Taiwan to its increasingly aggressive behavior in the Pacific and beyond to its widespread human rights abuses.
If you were a cartoon villain devising a way to destroy America, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with more effective ways. Given how committed Biden is to this downward spiral and how fast the consequences are piling up, it will get worse.
Economic dislocation will accelerate. Inflation will spike further. Shortages will increase. The labor market will remain destabilized. Taxes will climb, growth and innovation will slow, and suffocating debt will extinguish the future. Crime will continue to spike and social unrest will accelerate. Our enemies may strike in unforeseen ways. And since COVID restrictions have conditioned us into a kind of submissive obedience, we’ll be more likely to passively accept all of it.
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As a result, more and more people will look to the government for help, which is one of the main points of the chaos. In another era, this upheaval would have been a political liability, but the Left sees it as an opportunity. After all, you can’t make a socialist omelet without breaking some eggs.
Biden and the Left are putting on a master-class in how to lose a country in 10 months. But as with the movie, a happier ending is achievable if we fight back against this anti-American experiment.
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