The painful consumer price inflation that has been the inevitable outcome of the Biden administration’s wildly dysfunctional fiscal and energy policies is clear to everyone trying to keep a household budget or balance a checkbook. The economic record of Joe Biden and his band of blindly ideological Leftists and climate cultists has been extraordinary—in the worst possible way.

Since Joe Biden entered the White House, the official Consumer Price Index, which tends to obscure the actual truth in order to avoid embarrassing our political masters, is up a whopping 17%, and the costs of individual items that Americans need to survive are even more depressing. Flour is up 37%. Eggs are up 35%. Canned fruits and vegetables are up 27%. Baby food is up 23%.

The insane Biden war on fossil fuels has been even more catastrophic for individuals and businesses. Home heating oil is up a shocking 61%. Diesel fuel is up 56%. Gasoline is up 38%. Natural gas is up 27%. Propane is up 23%.

Officially, the overall price of electricity has risen 27%. I would be (somewhat) happy if this were the case in my household. Having seen my own bill skyrocket 33% since the Bidenistas decided to save the planet by bankrupting Americans, I can attest to the personal pain of paying that bill every month.

Looking at all these individual essentials, one cannot help but wonder how the overall increase in consumer prices since Biden took office is officially only 17%, but this bit of statistical chicanery is another discussion for another day.

Rising prices have, unsurprisingly, emptied our collective pockets. Credit card debt has shot up 39%, and monthly savings have collapsed by 79%, which points to an America where a great many of us are tapped out and struggling to get by. Add rising interest rates to this misery, which has pushed down home ownership affordability a startling 36%, and it is easy to see why Americans are fed up with Joe Biden and his peculiar priorities, such as opening the floodgates to illegal immigrants and shoveling money into the extraordinarily corrupt Ukraine.

The only grim comfort we can take as we scrape and scramble to survive is that government at almost every level is even worse off than us beleaguered taxpayers. Under Biden’s presidency, the national debt has skyrocketed by $6.4 trillion—yes, that’s trillion—and we are now spending more on debt service than national defense. Many state and local governments—saddled with unfunded pension plans, crumbling infrastructure, a commercial real estate apocalypse, runaway urban crime, escalating homelessness, softening residential real estate sales, and the millions of new illegal immigrants demanding housing and services—are sliding into their own abyss of unsustainable debt and collapsing economic fortunes.

All of which brings me to a core question: When individuals, businesses, and government are all dead broke, where does your economic activity come from, and what happens when the spending stops? The short and frightening answer is that when your fiscal engine is dead on the tracks, you’re not going anywhere—and fast.

Moreover, we are seeing a startling number of layoffs. American businesses laid off 82,300 workers in January alone, and our “officially” low unemployment rate is masking the sad fact that much of our job creation under Biden has been in the form of so-called “McJobs”. 

According to the formula used to calculate the unemployment rate by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), you are counted as employed if you do “any work at all for pay or profit during the survey reference week. This includes all part-time and temporary work (italics mine), as well as regular full-time, year-round employment.” In other words, if you are able to find a part-time job stocking shelves or a local landscaper hires you to lay sod for a week—Presto!—your are considered gainfully employed, although you can only afford to sleep in your car. In addition, keep in mind that, if your family business is sliding into insolvency and you put your 16-year old son to work without pay while desperately trying to stay afloat, you can enjoy the pride in knowing the BLS considers him employed as well. Ah, the magic of statistics!

The sad fact of the matter is that chronic economic weakness over the past few years has been masked by government stimulus spending on a scale previously unimagined in our nation’s history. In just the past three years of the Biden Spending Extravaganza, we have accumulated more federal debt than we did during the first 214 years of our nation’s existence. When over $2 trillion per year of slap-happy fiscal stimulus is no longer available to goose America’s economy because deficit spending on this scale cannot continue indefinitely, that thud you will hear is an over-extended nation hitting the concrete of a reality we will no longer be able to avoid. The net result is sure to be that spending on all but the basic essentials will come to a shuddering halt, and a deflationary spiral will begin dragging down prices on a wide variety of goods and services.

Broke and busted consumers will not be riding to the rescue when this happens—as it surely must—and the pain across industry sectors will affect nations throughout the globe for many years to come while the price points of our new reality are being determined. Our economic kingdom of wildly inflationary policies combined with the heedless accumulation of debt is heading for a grim and unavoidable reckoning, and the stunning price deflation that will follow hard behind is certain to rattle our political, social, cultural, and institutional structures as nothing has since the onset of the Second World War.

Long story short: a lot of cozy and comforting assumptions about our nation and planet are going to be shattered, and it will take awhile to pick up the pieces and determine the shape of our brave, new, deflated world.