North Carolina can’t catch a break under the Biden-Harris administration.
The federal government’s appalling response to Hurricane Helene almost surely cost lives, adding insult to the injury of the inflation that has been crushing Tar Heel State residents for 3½ years. In fact, prices there have risen even faster than the national average.
The 40-year-high inflation that has afflicted North Carolinians specifically and Americans broadly started in Washington with runaway government spending. At the start of 2021, prices were rising at an annual rate of just 1.4%, and the economy was growing steadily.
Instead of allowing the economic recovery to simply continue, and let one-time emergency COVID spending expire, President Biden pushed for trillions of dollars in new spending bills, bloated with left-wing boondoggles and special-interest handouts.
A spendthrift Congress obliged and, whenever necessary, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to approve multitrillion-dollar spending bills. A recent analysis showed that Ms. Harris’ action in pushing through those pieces of legislation accounted for half the excess inflation in the last three years.
That’s because every time Congress and the White House spent money the nation didn’t have, the Federal Reserve ended up creating the money for the Treasury to spend. This rampant increase in the money supply cut one-fifth of the value of the dollar in less than four years, which in turn caused prices to rise.
Since inflation has far outpaced wage gains, families have had to either reduce their spending or go into debt. That’s why credit card debt is at a record high, and Americans are paying over $300 billion annually in finance charges on their outstanding balances.