AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
As Americans head to the polls Tuesday, every indication suggests inflation will be the top issue on the minds of voters—and that if a red wave materializes (as is widely expected), Democrats will largely have their own exorbitant spending bills to blame. But it’s not just the amount of money Democrats have spent, but how they have spent it, and from whom they have taken it. Over the past two years, Democrats have looted the Middle Class to pay off their political allies, setting the stage for a catastrophic election cycle.
Most Americans would likely agree that if inflation were the result of something truly important—like funding a World War III victory or even building a 21st century version of the interstate highway system—voters could have good faith conversations about whether that inflation was worth the cost. But the inflation Americans are facing today, of course, is no such thing. Instead, Americans are struggling to feed their families because Democrats are flushing voters’ money straight into the pockets of far-left interest groups so that they can indulge their wildest fantasies and bribe their activist voting base.
Biden’s 2021 COVID “stimulus” package is a prime example. The bill was brimming with wasteful spending oriented towards some of the far left’s most prized policy goals. $50 million of the $1.9 trillion bill went to the Environmental Protection Agency for so-called “environmental justice” and “environmental infrastructure” programs; $783.5 million in stimulus checks went to convicted criminals; $30 million went to so-called “smoking kits” for crack addicts; and more than $4 billion went to illegal aliens. These were just a few of the ridiculous expenditures in that gargantuan, inflation-causing bill.
But this barely scratches the surface of the outrageous litany of left-wing policies that Americans are now funding. K-12 schools have received an unfathomable $130 billion in taxpayer dollars in COVID relief money, which has been used for practically every pet project imaginable, including to indoctrinate students with Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology. The massive infusion of COVID cash has been used for countless other ridiculous causes: Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser spent $3 million to paint and rename the “Black Lives Matter plaza” near the White House. Democrat city officials in Alexandria, Virginia, used $120,000 to update its tourism website. According to the Associated Press, Democrats in Broward County, Florida, used $140 million for a luxurious spa and hotel. And Democrats in Cleveland, Ohio, created a $6 million slush fund for each city council member to use however they wanted.
Perhaps most devastatingly for the economy, Biden’s so-called “American Rescue Plan” spent a whopping $400 million on paying Americans not to work, worsening an already alarming labor shortage that poured more fuel on the inflation fires. Furthermore, Democrats’ Green New Deal agenda has resulted in immeasurable harm to the millions of energy workers in the fossil fuel industry—even as heating and gas costs for normal Americans continue to skyrocket. All of this added cost is pure wasted, stolen from the Middle Class to fund Democrats’ environmental extremist allies. To make matters worse, these very energy policies are exacerbating inflationary pressures by driving up prices even further and keeping energy workers out of the workforce.
The left has continued to ransack the Middle Class through Biden’s highly unpopular action on student debt forgiveness, which has worsened the already wide gap between wealthy Democrats and Middle Class Americans. Though Biden and others in the Democratic Party have insisted mass debt cancellation will have no inflationary effects, in reality, the onus for the debt cancellation will fall squarely on American taxpayers, many of whom either already paid off their student debts or did not take out student loans in the first place.
By every indication, the left’s pattern of reckless spending binges and contempt toward the Middle Class is a winning issue for Republicans. A handful of recent TV ads has effectively called the left’s looting of Americans to attention: in August, for instance, American Action Network launched a one-minute ad urging voters to “stop Biden’s bailout for rich kids,” featuring footage of blue-collar workers lamenting the reality that their hard work is going to “pay off some other guy’s debt.” A similar ad sponsored by Our American Century targeted endangered Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) for his stated intention to cancel $50,000 in student debt—which would mean, in the words of the ad’s narrator, that “working class folks in Georgia that have been busting their hump for 25 years would be forced to pay off the gender studies degree for the bartender with blue hair.”
No matter how persistently Democrats might claim that their series of gigantic spending bills are vital for economic recovery and the wellbeing of the American people, the facts paint a decidedly different picture. In reality, the American Middle Class is not incurring these massive price tags for World War II-level conflicts that require extraordinary levels of financial sacrifice. Instead, the American people’s suffering comes from being asked to subsidize Democrat interest groups and far-left utopian schemes.
As Americans head to the voting booth, they will surely not forget why they have endured unprecedented levels of economic suffering—and why inflation is here in the first place. In the end, the Democratic Party is the party of looters—and the only way to stop the large-scale theft of the Middle Class is to vote them out.