Addressing Forever Crises

It does not suffice for this administration to attribute record 8.5 percent inflation to “Putin’s price hike.” We have endured not just the pandemic, but two years of extremes in irresponsible bipartisan reaction to it, including the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act’s unprecedented bailouts and fiscal stimulus, financial market intervention and subsidization, housing market disruption via eviction moratoria, and more. State lockdowns topped everything off, along with a refusal to permanently root out unneeded regulations throughout the economy.

Reckless interventions continued in 2021 with Biden’s costly American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. New for 2022 is planned bipartisan meddling to the tune of hundreds of billions in inflationary spending that will further disrupt the evolution of infrastructure and technology for decades to come. Now Biden is pushing unilateral and inflationary executive action in at least four epic “whole-of-government” spending and regulatory campaigns. encompassing “Equity,” “Climate Crisis,” “Competition Policy,” and now “Long COVID,” that will make doing business harder and hike prices even higher, along with spending he plans to “Build a Better America with Bipartisan Infrastructure Law investments in rural communities.”

Today, “bipartisanship” has resulted in the largest government on Earth. To address this, emergency passage of an “Abuse-of-Crisis Prevention Act” is needed to head off repeats of the inflationary political predations that have accompanied not just the recent pandemic, but 9/11 and its creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the financial bailouts of 2008. These exploitations of crisis have become a pattern.

Holding authorities, from police to presidents, responsible has become a central theme in today’s political debate, and it needs to be invoked here. We should be scaling new heights of prosperity and cheaper goods after having abandoned what Biden called “forever wars.” Unfortunately, we find ourselves at a point where Biden’s own State of the Union Address doesn’t merely double down but trillions down on new spending and regulation. A series of hearings and must get to the bottom of these abuses and rectify matters with crisis prevention legislation before the next inevitable economic shock emerges and Washington attempts to exploit the situation again.