Horowitz: Whose inflation? Are we supposed to pretend that Trump was never president?

With commodity prices soaring again and gas prices back at $4 a gallon, we are headed into a second wave of inflation built on top of a near-record baseline cost of living. This didn’t happen overnight.

Every Republican agrees that the debt is fueling inflation and that Joe Biden is responsible for it. Undoubtedly, Biden has aggravated the existing inflation issue with his war on energy, Green New Eeal, and Ukraine policy. But these are all supply-side policies that exacerbated the supply chain issues on top of the core inflation. But why is core inflation so high? It’s simply undeniable that the insane spending baseline that was built under Trump even before COVID and then blew to the sky with the failed COVID policies is the cake onto which Biden added the icing.

Milton Friedman is widely cited as believing the total delay between a change in monetary growth and change in the rate of inflation is between 12 and 18 months. We all agree that the Fed has been forced to print trillions in dollars to service all the debt passed by Congress and the last president culminating in 2020. We all agree that this has caused inflation. But who is responsible for it?

Here is the total tab for the COVID spending:

Most of the $4.7 trillion spent by the Federal Reserve was spent under Trump’s watch, at the behest and stewardship of his hand-picked Federal Reserve chair and secretary of the treasury – Jerome Powell and Steven Mnuchin. They were two of the greatest globalists of all time who have done immeasurable damage to our way of life that we are still dealing with until this day. Every issue with cost of living and the transfer of wealth to woke corporations flows from those decisions in 2020.

Yes, Biden added to this baseline, but what do you expect a leftist president to do when a Republican predecessor builds the cake? To be fair, I don’t think Trump would have added insult to injury by locking up our oil and gas and keeping the war in Ukraine going this long. Nor would he have passed the Green New Deal. But the irrevocable consequences of inflationary spending did not begin with Biden. Are we supposed to pretend like this never happened?

Jerome Powell and Steven Mnuchin did as much damage to our economy as Fauci's COVID policies did to our bodies. We all thought Obama’s spending shocked our consciences, but Trump’s levels of spending that he approved with the help of Mnuchin and Paul Ryan blew out Obama’s levels – even before COVID.

To put it simply, the reason we are facing a permanent cycle of hyper-inflation is because our national debt has increased by a whopping 59% since January 2017. That has never occurred at any other time in history. We are accruing levels of debt that are surpassing the WWII era, except, unlike in the 1940s, we are building nothing with it, and the trend is permanent. Just remember that 68% of that debt increase since 2017 was under Trump. The M2 money supply shot up 26% in Trump’s final 10 months in office, while that extra cash was chasing fewer goods than ever. Federal spending has risen 40% since 2019, making COVID, unlike WWII spending, a permanent baseline.

On March 25, 2020, right before Trump strong-armed the lockdown bill through Congress against the wishes of the Freedom Caucus, I warned that if inflation was not a concern, why not just hand everyone a $100,000 check? Indeed, Trump kept demanding even more stimulus checks from the GOP Senate.

I understand the election-year sentiment, but then he needs to take ownership of the inflation and explain to us why during the next contrived crisis he won’t fall into the same trap. You can’t believe in endless money printing and near-zero interest rates (Trump even wanted negative rates) without paying the piper. It is this sort of impetuous reaction to short-term effects and the refusal to understand long-term consequences that got us the inflation crisis after he left office.

As Reagan’s OMB director, David Stockman, points out, Trump’s record on debt is unrivaled:

Federal Spending: Constant 2021 Dollar Increase Per Year:

• Trump, 2016-2020: +$366 billion per annum;
• Obama, 2008-2016: +$86 billion per annum;
• George Bush the Younger:+$136 billion per annum;
• Bill Clinton, 1992-2000:+$34 billion per annum;
• George Bush the Elder: +$97 billion per annum;
• Ronald Reagan, 1980-1988: +$64 billion per annum;
• Jimmy Carter, 1976-1980: +$62 billion per annum;

Federal Spending: Annual Real Growth Rate:

• Trump, 2016-2020: 6.92%;
• Obama, 2008-2016: 1.96%;
• George Bush the Younger: 3.95%;
• Bill Clinton, 1992-2000: 1.19%;
• George Bush the Elder: 3.90%;
• Ronald Reagan, 1980-1988: 3.15%;
• Jimmy Carter, 1976-1980: 3.72%

As you can see, the annual growth rate of spending under Trump was nearly 3.5 times that of Obama, and the average increase in debt per annum was four times Obama’s level. As a result, Trump added nearly twice the amount of debt per annuum as Obama:

• Donald Trump: $2.043 trillion;
• Barack Obama: $1.061 trillion;
• George W. Bush: $0.694 trillion;
• Bill Clinton: $0.168 trillion;
• George H.W. Bush: $0.609 trillion;
• Ronald Reagan: $0.384 trillion;
• Jimmy Carter: -$0.096 trillion.

We can make excuses left and right, but at the end of the day Trump was spending more than Obama pre-COVID. And COVID itself is no excuse. We all warned about the Cares Act and the subsequent bills he passed months after anyone with an IQ over 90 knew this was a farce. Before leaving offices, he gave over $80 billion to blue-state schools to continue Zoom sessions, after promising to shut it down. This is parallel to the fact that the CARES Act funded $400 million to distribute election assistance funding for the states to remake our elections through mail-in ballots.

Thus, as every Republican complains about biomedical tyranny, record inflation, and mail-in ballot elections, ask yourself who baked that very cake. Sure, Biden was happy to add icing on top of it, as Democrats always do when Republicans hand them the cake on a silver platter. But how are we supposed to act as if Trump was not president at the most pivotal moments that solidified the implementation of the very policies against which he is now railing?

Inflation is thus a part of Trump’s legacy the same way the vaccine remains his proudest moment – both stemming from the same shortsighted mentality. This was all about the Great Reset, which was designed to remake our economy. The man who fell into the trap is very unlikely to be the one to reset the Great Reset.