Good riddance to 2022.
It can’t be gone soon enough. Even with COVID finally over (mostly) and a return to business as usual, instead of a year of prosperity and growth, we got the opposite.
For the overall economy, for family finances, and for the stock market, things were pretty dismal.
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The one bright spot was the jobs market with business hiring back workers at a brisk pace and very low unemployment rate throughout the year. But there was not much else to boast about.
The U.S. economic engine stalled out into a mild recession in the first half of the year, and the inflation rate went above 9% this past summer.
For the year the Consumer Price Index (CPI) finished above 7%, which translated into the biggest annual rise in prices in some four decades.
Families lost about $4,000 to $5,000 in real take-home pay, according to the Heritage Foundation due to the higher prices at the gas pump and the grocery store.
A Committee to Unleash Prosperity report found that the typical 401(k) retirement plan lost more than $30,000.
Then there was the stock market selloff that flattened Americans’ savings and wealth. Some $12 trillion of wealth was vaporized in 2022. Adjusting for inflation, the Nasdaq fell by 35%, the S&P by nearly 25% and the Dow Jones by 9%.
The national debt clock – the U.S. government’s negative credit card balance -- spun up to more than $32,000,000,000,000.
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This awful performance didn’t happen by accident. It was largely a result of a cascade of public policy blunders in Washington and in states and cities throughout the country.
Here’s my list of the worst of the worst economic policy mistakes:
Even with the nation’s finances in shambles and even with Republicans promising that they would get control of Uncle Sam’s record red ink, Biden joined hands with Republicans to pass yet another gargantuan year-end spending bill filled with pork, and beefy increases for nearly every federal agency. Both parties share the blame for this oinker. If there were ever an argument for term limits, this was it.
Shame, shame, shame – especially on Republicans who claim to be against big government but vote for it.
Polls show by wide margins Americans don’t want to be forced to buy electric cars and only 6% of all new car sales are EVs. But California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Sacramento politicians weren’t listening. They are going to require EVERYONE to have an EV over the next dozen years.
Then two weeks after Newsom approved the regulation, power outages stranded cars all over the state.
It’s only going to get worse, left coasters.
Even if you filled Yankee Stadium with IRS agents that wouldn’t be enough seats for all the new hires the tax revenue collectors Congress wants to hire in 2023 and 2024. These auditors, agents, and snoopers will be examining even financial transactions as little as $600. And it’s not just rich people who are going to be audited and investigated.
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But while Congress wants to double the size of the IRS, they also have spent the last two years adding new loopholes, carve-outs, and special interest favors as they add hundreds of new pages of tax complexity to the tax code. With a simple, flat, fair and comprehensible tax code, the IRS could lay off half of its auditors.
Biden has killed pipelines, he’s stopped refineries and LNG terminals. America’s natural gas exports have slowed to a trickle as Europe gets more hooked on gas from Russia – which only supplies more money for Putin’s war machine.
We’re draining our oil reserves. Gas prices spiked to more than $5.00 a gallon earlier this year (up from $2.59 a gallon under Trump) in some parts of the country and home heating costs have tripled in many U.S. counties.
President Biden then blames "big oil" for driving up prices. It’s an anti-fossil fuel American energy policy that only our enemies like China, Iran and Russia could love.
It wasn’t just energy shortages that caused gridlock, ships at our ports that couldn’t get unloaded for weeks, and empty shelves across America in 2022. We ran out of baby formula, eggs, Tylenol, tampons, semiconductors for phones, prescription meds, and fertilizer for farmers to grow our food. Even toilet paper was sold out. It was like we were the old Soviet Union.
Hardly anyone had ever heard of the term "supply chain" problems before Biden was president.
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Worse, the Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who was in charge of this logistics problem, and a man who took family leave in 2021 at the start of the crisis, proved entirely incompetent for the task at hand.
Why are there still three to four million fewer Americans working than before COVID even with millions of job openings?
One reason is that in more than 20 states a family of four can get benefits that exceed the pay of a construction worker, a mechanic, a security guard or a factory worker. Paying people NOT to work is a dumb government policy that is bad for businesses, taxpayers, and families.
Nearly three years after COVID hit these shores and with now conclusive evidence that lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates don’t work and cause more problems than they solve– they’ve lingered and even are making a comeback in many states and cities.
Vaccine and mask mandates are back. Schools are shutting down again in many school districts to protect against the flu.
The government and the CDC’s campaign of fear won’t go away as Americans seek a return to normalcy.
