(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party or candidate on the part of Newsmax.)
With no thanks to profligate government spending, the more than $28 trillion national debt now equals the nation’s entire GDP, with the nearly $2 trillion 2024 budget alone accounting for 7% of GDP.
According to Congressional Budget Office projections, that public debt owed by you, me and our children will top $50 trillion by 2035, amounting to about 122% of GDP.
If this current trend continues, the annual interest payment will reach $1.7 trillion — 4.1% of GDP within 10 years, about as much as we spend on national defense.
And don’t count on fixing that problem by printing more money. We should have learned about the painful inflationary influences of this strategy by now.
There doesn’t seem to be any pathways out of this dilemma other than to make our national economy stronger by rewarding free enterprise and reining in government spending on mismanaged giveaway programs that interfere with rather than benefit most of our lives.
Think for example, policies that suppress energy sources needed to support household and business expenses, fuel industries and transport commodities while spending huge amounts of taxpayer and consumer money on costly and unreliable green wind and solar fantasies along with electric vehicle subsidies that rely upon Chinese and other foreign supply chains for the rare earth battery materials.
This is the same China that is building the equivalent of one coal-fired plant weekly to achieve "net-zero" global greenhouse gas emissions.
Whereas presidential candidate Kamala Harris is campaigning upon “turning the page” to create an “opportunity economy,” she has repeatedly dodged explaining what this means, or why the Biden-Harris administration didn’t do this nearly four years sooner.
We’re now supposed to turn the page on all that, forget that Kamala’s failed record is printed all over that page she wants us to turn, and expect that the repeat of another chapter of the same big spending taxpayer handout policies will tell a happier story.
Not mentioned in the real story is the fact that by the time that they had entered the White House, the U.S. economy had already emerged from a devastating pandemic-induced recession and had begun to recover.
In February 2020, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the unemployment level under Trump stood at 3.5%, matching its lowest level in more than 50 years. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product then increased at a solid annualized clip of 2.1% over the final three months of 2019.
The 14.7% April 2020 unemployment rate dropped 10% by year’s end to 6.7% as much of the economy reopened and business activity returned to something resembling normal.
Whereas that rate was still nearly double pre-pandemic levels, it was well below the peak reached right after the outbreak with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P ending at record highs.
By the time Trump left office, the stock market, so crucial to workers’ 401(k)s, was stronger than before COVID, and by the first quarter of 2021, the nation’s gross domestic product was as well.
By the time President Biden signed his “American Rescue Plan” in March 2021, unemployment had already dropped to 6.1%, compared with more than 8% that had occurred throughout nearly all of Obama’s pre-COVID term.
Nevertheless, there was no audible outcry from Democrats regarding the high unemployment rate, which didn’t drop to 6.1% until Obama had been in office five years when he and Joe Biden ran for reelection in 2012.
The Biden-Harris “rescue plan” which passed the Senate with V.P Kamala’s tie-breaking vote was enacted when recovery was already well underway. This combined with state benefits which together paid many recipients more than they would have earned by returning to pre-COVID jobs, had enormous inflationary consequences.
To compete with the plan’s largess, businesses were forced to raise pay — and then prices. This led to the Fed’s interest rate increases, leading in turn to slowing job growth.
This Biden-Harris spending exacerbated inflationary consequences of Kamala’s tie breaking vote to pass the “Cares Act” a year earlier which provided an additional $600 on top of the weekly maximum unemployment benefit for four months.
Add to this Kamala’s tie-breaking vote on the Biden-Harris Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act budget boondoggle that included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public EV charging stations across the U.S., which, as of April, only eight had been built.
Meanwhile, as Biden-Harris Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has informed us that FEMA has run out of money for U.S. hurricane disaster relief, his department had allocated $780 million for the migrant crisis last year initially through the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program.
Last year $156 million has been allocated to New York City alone by the federal government for the ongoing migrant crisis — currently costing around $388 per day to house and care for a single household.
On top of that, Vice President Harris then pledged $157 million more in U.S. foreign humanitarian support such as food and shelter for Lebanon, bringing that total assistance amount to over $385 million.
Let’s recognize that the upcoming November election is a referendum on free enterprise vs. free stuff we simply can’t afford.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.