In the bad, old days of the Great Depression, before government welfare programs existed, the lament of the impoverished was the topic of a song, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
People begged for money, or sold apples or pencils on street corners to get some money because they had to do so. There was no free lunch, either literally or figuratively, for the down and out, at least as far as the government was concerned.
Keynesian patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became President and introduced programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, in which the government created jobs to do public works projects and paid the workers.
Roosevelt had this naive idea, long discarded by our modern leftists, that people would prefer work to a handout because it gave them self-respect.
Now, only unsympathetic Republicans have the temerity to suggest that many on the public dole ought to do something, anything, to earn their handouts.
An added complication these days is the government is both eager to create economic hardship with ridiculous legislation and regulation, then quick to try to attempt to cure the self-inflicted damage with handouts.
We’re due for an update of the old song. Call the 2022 version, “Brother can you buy my vote?”
The Biden regime isn’t alone in blame for our current stagflation malaise. The seeds have been sown through this and multiple prior regimes in both government and the Federal Reserve.
Decades of rampant spending, geometric money creation and below-market interest rates have created mountains of debt that cannot, will not, be repaid.
The generic term for such excesses is bubbles. All that is needed is the metaphorical pin and the whole thing collapses.
The Federal Reserve, which just a year ago was praying for inflation, now is raising interest rates in an attempt to strangle consumers and, by extension, the economy to cure rampant inflation. The Fed will announce more rate increases Thursday, likely three-quarters of a percentage point.
Think of the Fed as one huge, pointy pin.
This is bad news if you happen to control the government as Democrats, led by the Biden Gang, do.
Sure, things you voters need cost more, if you can find them. Yes, your wages are not keeping pace with price increases.
And, OK, there is more crime and general insanity afoot.
Polls already indicate your widespread unhappiness with Joe and the gang. But will that be communicated in mid-term elections, with the usual suspects again counting the votes?
Biden and friends don’t seem to be willing to think that they can rerun the 2020 election “ miracle” comeback.
Time to buy some insurance.
They announced just today the sale of 20 million more barrels of oil from the misnamed Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That will happen, by chance, in September and October, just ahead of those mid-term elections.
It will bring the draining of the SPR to 200 million barrels overall and ostensibly allow the Biden mouthpieces to crow about gasoline prices being below $5 a gallon – at least in some precincts.
How curious that when prices were rising it was all Putin’s fault, even though prices rose long before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Now that prices are down about 50 cents, a small part of the meteoric rise by the way, Biden and his sycophants want to take a bow.
Biden’s operatives also have leaked word that a student loan debt repayment moratorium, and some outright debt forgiveness is being planned for – wait for it – just before mid-term elections.
Biden is not alone. Senator Pocahontas Warren is shrieking to pour more gasoline on the inflation fire with more government freebies.
This sort of thinking regrettably is a winner in a nation populated mostly by economic illiterates, whose frame of reference ends at their front door. They just can’t grasp how those $2,000 stimulus payments increased the prices for virtually everything they buy and while the handouts have stopped, for now, the high prices remain.
But buying votes is all Biden and friends know, and I would be reluctant to bet against it all working for them in the mid-term elections.
Let the giveaways begin.
Brother, you can buy a lot of votes.
Sam Ross Jr's site 