 My dad had an expression. He said, don't tell me what your value. Show me your budget. I'll tell you what your value. So President Joe Biden has released his budget plan for fiscal 2023 at the very moment. We're experiencing the highest inflation rates in 40 years, and it turns out he values the same sort of government spending that is already sending prices sky high. You'd figure with COVID receding, debt rising, and a tidal wave of unfunded liability staring us right in the kisser, Biden would take the opportunity to radically reset the federal government's balance sheet. Instead, his budget plan could be called rearranging debt chairs on the Titanic. The president wants to spend $5.8 trillion, which would include jacking spending on defense, education, and police. He talks about levying a controversial and probably unconstitutional wealth tax on billionaires that will pay for it all, but he still expects a budget deficit of $1.2 trillion. If you're gonna tax unrealized capital gains, President Biden, at least spend it on something pretty, it's debt finance spending that spurs inflation in the first place. Rather than cutting spending and reforming entitlements, the government borrows and prints money so it can keep giving goodies to its favored citizens. You get more dollars chasing the same amount of goods, and that leads to price hikes. Meanwhile, at least a dozen states, California, Georgia, Hawaii, and Maine among them are thinking about giving residents money to spend on things like gas, the price of which has gone through the roof. So today we're announcing a $9 billion tax refund to tens of millions of Californians. Dolling out tax dollars to alleviate the pain of inflation caused by government spending is like drinking a beer in the morning to ease your hangover. It's only setting up the next binge. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has announced a series of interest rate hikes to help tame inflation, but in a recent speech he made no mention of the increase in the money supply measured by M2, which is risen by a record 41% in two years, or of the Federal Reserve's holding of US debt, which has jumped $3.5 trillion over the same time period. And his interest rate hikes will be small enough that it's unclear they'll have much impact. Back in the 1980s, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker allowed the Fed funds rate to more than double in less than two years time to over 20%. That helped kill inflation, but it also caused the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Worse, serious hikes by the Fed today will not just likely cause a major economic downturn, they will devastate the government's balance sheet, requiring either massive tax hikes on everyone, huge reductions in government services, or a combination of both. According to recent conservative estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, as the federal budget grows, the cost of paying interest on the debt will keep increasing until it accounts for about 24 cents of every dollar spent by 2050. And that assumed interest rates would remain historically low. So even moderate increases in the Fed's fund rate would push the cost of servicing the debt much higher, causing the government to borrow more money, kicking us into a vicious cycle of economic despair. We're reducing the size of the deficit relative to our economy by almost two-thirds, reducing inflationary pressures, and making real headway cleaning up the fiscal mess I inherited. Joe Biden can talk a good game about fiscal responsibility, but it's clear he doesn't understand why prices are going up and his policies will keep them high for the foreseeable future. That might cost him and the Democrats control of the House and the Senate in the fall, perhaps the White House in 2024. That'll be too bad for him and his party. But his unwillingness to confront massive spending and debt is going to cost all of us a lot more than that.