OPINION:
Our national debt today stands at a staggering $29 trillion.
Every dime of this debt is money that has been borrowed and already spent to make life better, easier or more luxurious at some point in the past. Sometimes this money was spent for the benefit of Americans, but very often, this long-gone money was spent for the benefit of people living in far-flung places around the world.
No American child alive today will live to see this debt paid off. They will be in debt paying off the spoils of their parents’ enjoyment for the rest of their lives. And they will never get to take part in the luxury and treasure of the debt they inherited.
Twenty-nine trillion dollars in debt is a generational monument to greed, theft, hubris and stupidity.
Egyptian pharaohs had their pyramids. Low, slow and slothful American politicians leave behind a mountain of debt.
And just when our financial future could not look any bleaker, Democrats in Washington swoop into action. Again.
On Wednesday, Congress voted — almost exclusively along party lines — to take out yet another credit card in the name of America’s future children. Democrats approved borrowing another $2.5 trillion that they will never ever pay off.
President Biden and Democrats happily signed away your children’s future with this new line of credit. And then breathed a sigh of relief because they avoided an uncomfortable political pickle.
And it wasn’t just Democrats who were thrilled. So was Wall Street. By the end of the day Wednesday, the stock market roared. The Dow jumped 380 points, and the Nasdaq spiked more than 2%.
Perhaps it is unfair to blame Mr. Biden entirely for this current debt. To be sure, he is not the only political criminal responsible. But it is worth remembering a few dates in recent history.
When Mr. Biden became vice president of the United States under former President Barack Obama, our national debt stood at $11 trillion. By the time he left office eight years later, the debt had reached $20 trillion.
And no politician has been lying around Washington longer than Joe Biden as this avalanche of debt has accumulated. When he first joined the United States Senate in 1972, the national debt was less than half a trillion.
To be sure, Wall Street is popping champagne over more than just America’s new credit card taken out in your grandchild’s name. Sleazy debt merchants are also tickled by the Federal Reserve’s recent political maneuverings promising to squeeze down on all the “stimulus” that government politicians have flooded into the economy with bad debt and printed money.
It turns out, as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted recently, inflation is not so “transitory” after all. In fact, the government now admits that inflation has reached levels not seen in nearly a half-century. And that is only because the government cooks the books on inflation.
Real actual inflation is higher than it has ever been in the history of the U.S. dollar — all because of massive government spending, billed to your children.
While all the goons — from the Fed to the ranks of the Republican Party — are to blame, nobody deserves more blame than Mr. Biden and the present crop of kleptocrats in the Democrat Party.
Black Lives Matter, open borders, brutal taxes, defunding the police and teaching hate in public schools are all prominent planks of today’s Democrat Party. But nothing Mr. Biden embraces is more immediately damaging to the poor people — particularly the working poor — than this unbridled campaign of stagflation that he leads.
When everyone gets poorer and poorer, the already-poor pay the harshest price. Inflation does not see skin color or gender, or political persuasion.
Yet today, Democrats in Congress want to pile trillions more in spending and savage debt upon an already staggered people. Inflation is the civil rights issue of our day.
Mr. Biden and his Democrats will pay the political price.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
