Up and Up and Up
What to know: Prices for consumers are continuing to rise. According to Fox Business, “The Fed says inflation is ‘transitory’ but Wall Street and Main Street are not so sure.”
The TPPF take: Inflation is real, and no bureaucratic assurances can hide that fact.
“Put simply, the Fed has the authority to create money out of nothing for the purpose of buying government debt,” explains TPPF’s E.J. Antoni. “When new money is created, it diminishes the value of the existing money because there is now more of it. When additional money is trying to purchase the same amount of goods and services, prices rise.”
For more on inflation—and how to slow it—click here.
Debt Ceiling
What to know: The debt ceiling battle is about to begin—again.
The TPPF take: There’s an opportunity here to win spending cuts, or at least to demonstrate that the Democrats in power aren’t interested in fiscal responsibility.
‘Previous Congresses used the debt limit as a leverage point to extract spending cuts or reforms, the most recent successful example being the Budget Control Act of 2011,” says TPPF’s Wes Coopersmith. “The logic is simple. If the federal government needs to issue more debt, the current level of government spending is too high and must be brought under control.”
For more on the debt limit, click here.
Yeah, That Doesn’t Work
What to know: Younger Americans increasingly say they prefer socialism to capitalism (though they’re pretty unclear on what both of these really are).
The TPPF take: It’s important that we explain clearly what socialism is—and why it fails every time it is tried.
“Socialists fail to recognize the truth that nothing is free,” explains TPPF’s Vance Ginn. “More precisely, scarcity means there are always costs, whether realized or unrealized. Free college and universal health care could be fantastic services if they were truly free, but the government doesn’t have its own money—it must extract resources from Peter to give to Paul, and ‘free’ provisions like these have poor outcomes.”
For more on the differences between socialism and capitalism, click here.