| “We were probably destined to have supply-chain issues and other economic hiccups as the country emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. But our government worsened the problem by throwing gobs and gobs of new money into the economy, much faster than the country could produce goods.
“In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the national unemployment rate spiked to 14.8 percent. But by October of that year, unemployment was down to 6.9 percent, and by March 2021, it was down to 6 percent. The U.S. gross domestic product had crashed in the second quarter of 2020, rebounded dramatically in the third, and returned to regular growth
in the fourth. On December 21, 2020, Congress approved a $2.3 trillion funding package consisting of a $900 billion end-of-the-year Covid-19 stimulus bill attached to a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill to fund the government through September 30, 2021. In other words, by March 2021, as the vaccines were rolling out, the U.S. economy was well along the road to returning to normal.
“But then, once President Biden took office, Democrats in Congress passed, and Biden signed, another $1.9 trillion package of “pandemic relief” in March atop the $900 billion they had spent four months earlier. And by November, Biden had signed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill on top of that. And then this March, he signed a $1.5 trillion omnibus bill.
“That’s a lot of money being borrowed and thrown into the U.S. economy in a short period of time — about $5.9 trillion in a 16-month span. In other words, a whole lot of money is chasing too few goods.”
|
.png)
