Economist Brian Wesbury said Thursday that both Congress and Americans “got hooked” on the federal government’s spending binge during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021, prices have risen by over 20%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) reached a high of 9% in June 2022, with some experts saying Biden’s hostility to fossil fuel production and massive spending packages fueled the increase in prices. Wesbury compared the COVID-19 pandemic legislation to treating the victim of a “car wreck” with morphine, only to make the victim dependent.
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“The unfortunate thing about our world today is everything we did during Covid, pumping in trillions, $4 trillion to $5 trillion of new money from the Fed, $5 trillion in deficit spending from our government, and handing it out to people who weren’t working, all of this, first of all, if you owned assets, it inflated them, you won,” Wesbury told Fox Business host Cheryl Casone. “If you don’t own assets, you lost.”
“I’ve always called what we did, well Covid, if you think about it, was a car wreck and we broke our leg in four places and the ambulance showed up and then they pumped us full of morphine and they take you to the hospital and ask you how you’re feeling and you’re like ‘Man, I’ve never felt better’ and they have to remind you it’s the morphine talking,” Wesbury said. “So part of this problem is people got used to the morphine. They got hooked on it and kept spending, so part of it is their own personal decisions, but a lot of it was caused by the government hooking everybody on morphine in the first place.”
The Federal Reserve announced it would cut the prime interest rate by 0.25%, placing the target range between 4.25% to 4.50%, on Dec. 18, even though the Consumer Price Index rose by 2.7% year-over-year in November.
Many officials dismissed inflation, with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell saying that inflation would be transitory during an August 2021 speech at Jackson Hole, Wyo. before saying in September 2021 that inflation ended up lasting longer than he “expected.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, during a June 2022 appearance on CNN, said she was wrong to underestimate the risk of inflation.
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