Printing money out of thin air.
For all the commentary over Congress‘ $95 billion giveaway to Ukraine, at least one aspect was almost completely overlooked: Like every fresh dollar that comes out of Washington these days, every penny of that $95 billion was borrowed.
The government is already on track to run a $2 trillion deficit in the current fiscal year, far more than earlier official estimates of $1.5 trillion. All that deficit spending is driving the inflation that has plagued Americans for the last four years.
If you’ve ever wondered where Congress gets the money to finance today’s unprecedented deficits, look no further than your grocery bill or the gas pump. Every time you put gas in the tank or groceries in the back seat, you pay Washington.
When Congress spends money it doesn’t have, it tells the Treasury to borrow it. Because the Treasury is trying to borrow more than people are willing to lend, it turns to the Federal Reserve, which effectively prints it out of thin air.
Tally up the trillions, and it’s like pouring water into the wine of the dollar’s purchasing power. In just over three years, this shell game has destroyed one-fifth of the value of every dollar you owned, siphoned off and handed to Congress, lately for Ukraine.
With Wall Street rumblings about a fiscal crisis, you might think Congress would spend only what is absolutely necessary. Instead, the lobbyists have once again made out like bandits.
What did we buy for $95 billion? Most will be flushed down Ukraine’s meat grinder, which is sacrificing a generation of young Ukrainians. And $26 billion goes to the Middle East, where, bizarrely, we fund both sides of the conflict. A final $8 billion goes to Taiwan, a rich country that can pay its own bills and—it’s worth noting—has both a border and clean, safe cities.
Meanwhile, there’s not a penny for our own border crisis or our collapsing cities. In fact, the bill rips another hole in our border by providing $3.5 billion to the State Department to expand immigration—from the Middle East, of all places.
So, on top of the inflation, America gets a further weakening of her wide-open border. But the arsenic icing on this cyanide cake is the dollar-destroying seizure of Russian financial assets.
The law allows the president to “confiscate” (a euphemism for steal) the dollar-denominated assets owned by the Russian central bank. However exciting this might be for the Ukraine flag-wavers in Congress, this puts every country in the world on notice that U.S. dollars are dangerous to own.
Many foreign nations no longer want to hold dollars as a reserve currency because they now realize their dollars aren’t safe but can be confiscated instead. China is happy to exploit this, welcoming countries into its anti-U.S. BRICS bloc.
This flight from dollars is accelerating; the Federal Reserve recently dodged an inquiry about how much gold is being withdrawn from America by foreigners who don’t believe the U.S. is a safe place for their financial assets anymore.
Meanwhile, Russia has already begun to retaliate, seizing commensurate American investments to pay for what President Biden is stealing from them. This is a tit-for-tat formula for dethroning the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The political establishment on both sides of the aisle has made it clear once again that it serves the lobbyists, not the people. That status quo will remain until Americans of all parties wake up.
