Economy
Biden’s Price Hike
CHUYN/GettyimagesPlus; flickr/AdamFagan

Biden’s Price Hike

Biden must share blame with Congress and the Federal Reserve for the policies fueling rapidly rising prices from the gas pump to the grocery store. But his finger-pointing at Putin and Trump is clearly intended to deflect blame. ...
Charles Scaliger

By now, the tens of millions of supporters of Joe Biden have had plenty of time for buyer’s remorse. Little more than a year after Biden’s inauguration, the American economy is in dizzying freefall, with the most visible effect being skyrocketing consumer-price inflation on a scale not seen in more than 40 years. With gasoline at its highest price levels ever, Americans are losing their traditional mobility. It now costs a small fortune to fill a car tank, let alone fuel up an 18-wheeler, and airline ticket prices have already gone up by more than 36 percent since the beginning of the year. Moreover, prices at the supermarket have soared to heights unseen since the Carter administration.  

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Against the backdrop of international crisis that could spiral into world war over Ukraine or the South China Sea, America’s gargantuan national debt continues to soar, undermining confidence in the dollar abroad and threatening our national solvency. Yet President Biden has just introduced a budget request featuring massive spending increases as well as the largest tax hike in American history. In particular, a massive tax on so-called unrealized benefits for wealthy shareholders would for the first time involve taxing gains in the value of assets that have not actually been liquidated or “realized.” Simply put, it means that if the value of a stock, bond, or other asset held by an investor increases in value, the government will be able to tax that increase even if the asset is not sold off and profits pocketed. This exotic new tax would only apply to a very small group of America’s wealthiest (at least, at first), and would be levied in order to ensure that all billionaires pay at least a 20-percent income-tax rate — the “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax.” 

The new tax proposal, which echoes unsuccessful attempts by the Biden administration to hike taxes last year, is being applauded by all the usual self-satisfied purveyors of class envy. Such destructive policies always find supporters among class-warfare fifth columnists. But the larger question is, how have the American economy and the American body politic come to such a disastrous pass? And where are such horrendously destructive policies likely to lead if America’s clueless and even malign leadership does not soon change direction?

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