President Biden’s, Democrat's Plans Already Hurting the Recovery

As anti-production policies take hold, supply and worker shortages appear – and inflation looms

By Phil Gramm and Rick Scott

Historically in America, the best healthcare, housing, transportation, nutrition and child-care program was a job. History also teaches us that if you give people things they typically derive from a job, don’t be surprised when they don’t take a job.

Yet the Biden administration claims that it hasn’t seen evidence that its unemployment bonus is keeping people from work.

With the Labor Department reporting record job openings – and with the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) reporting a record number of small businesses job offerings, but no takers – that claim isn’t credible.

The clearest example is the federal supplement to unemployment payments. The recent federal payments have made not working a viable – or an even preferred option to working. And it isn’t only excessive jobless compensation. The Congressional Budget Office found that the Affordable Care Act would cut the number of hours worked by as much as 2%, so how can expanding ObamaCare in the recent stimulus not affect employment? The same applies to expansions of Cobra, monthly child credits, and other income supports.

The U.S. economy clearly has the power to iron out the natural problems of restarting production, but the very nature of the subsidies in the $6 trillion Biden administration stimulus, relief and infrastructure bills constrain production. In its modern incarnation, socialism denies that government incentives and constraints have anything to do with people’s decisions to work, save and invest. Experience teaches otherwise.

Since the War on Poverty began, government transfer payments have risen to provide more than 90% of the income of the bottom 20% of income-earning households, and the labor force participation rate among work-age households has collapsed to 36% from 68%.

The Biden administration also asks Americans to believe that it can raise income, corporate and death taxes, smother the private sector with regulations, kill the fossil-fuel industry, and fill the regulatory agencies with activists fundamentally hostile to the nation’s economic system and it will have no effect on economic performance.

But back in the real world, much of what the president is doing will impede the recovery, reduce economic capacity and fuel inflation.
 

• The April Consumer Price Index rose by 0.8%, or 9.6% on an annualized basis.
• On an annual basis, the inflation rate for the past three months has been 7.2%, and 6.2% for the first four months of 2021.
• The core inflation rate, excluding food and energy, on an annual basis rose in April by 11%, a rate not exceeded since June of 1982.

While the price increases are significant, broad and accelerating, are they the temporary effects of demand recovering from the pandemic shutdown more quickly than production, or is there evidence that this is the return of the inflation that plagued us for a generation and we paid such a high price to escape 40 years ago?

As traditionally understood, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. While it may seem old-fashioned to ask in this brave new world of modern monetary theory, where Joe Biden declared last year that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” is there reason to be concerned that the broad money supply, M2, grew by 24.6% over the last year, a postwar high?

That’s more than twice the rate it grew in 1978 before inflation reached 13.4% in 1979, and almost three times the rate it grew amid the “guns and butter” spending surge during the Vietnam War.
 
We need only look at the Bureau of Economic Analysis comparison of the first quarter of 2021 to a year earlier to confirm Mr. Summers’s concerns.

Wages and salaries are already significantly larger in the first quarter of 2021 than they were before the pandemic. Transfer payments have almost doubled, and personal savings have surged to an extraordinary $4.1 trillion from $1.6 trillion a year ago. The end of the pandemic isn’t only unleashing the pent-up demand of the pre-shutdown economy, its opening the floodgate to a torrent of spending fueled by fiscal and monetary stimulus not seen since the Civil War.

If Congress sees inflation as a real threat, it should first stop spending. Any unobligated balances in the Biden stimulus or previous stimulus bills can no longer be justified under current economic circumstances and should be rescinded. Rescinding the spending authority in the Biden stimulus at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 would save $710 billion, according to CBO. Rescinding the authority sooner and including all previous stimulus bills might save $1 trillion.
 

• Congress should repeal the enhanced unemployment benefits and reinstate the Clinton-era work requirements for welfare.
• Work requirements should be applied to all unearned benefits to anyone except the elderly, the disabled and students.
• Congress should adopt a real, enforceable budget that funds infrastructure and the other functions of government without further expanding the deficit and debt.
• The debt ceiling, which expires on Aug. 1, should be used to set into place a long-term binding program to stop the federal debt from growing beyond 100% of gross domestic product.

If the inflation of the 1970s and ’80s has returned, it is the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” that have returned once again to teach us that water will wet us, fire will burn, and government can’t give us something for nothing.

Former Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) previously served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and currently holds a position as visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute. Prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate, Rick Scott was the Governor of Florida, and he now serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Mike Solon also contributed to this article.