2021 is behind us.  Biden’s big multi-trillion-dollar spending bill is defeated – for now.  With the passage of the Democrats’ other spending bills, however, inflation has become a minor pandemic of its own, as predicted.  If that big bill had passed, inflation would be much worse.

Nonetheless, inflation is now the worst it has been since the Democrat Jimmy Carter’s Presidency in the 1970s and into the very early 1980s, when Republican President Ronald Reagan’s economic changes finally reigned it in.  Sound familiar?

Most of us are too young to remember those years.  Those of us who experienced the ‘70s know how bad it was.  Convincing younger voters that the same type of Democrat President and Democrat-controlled Congress are the problem and not any kind of solution is problematic.  If younger voters fail to see the picture, then history will repeat itself, and most of us cannot afford that.

Hint:  for the first time in your young lives, news articles are reporting that companies are having to give cost-of-living raises to retain employees – just like what happened back in the ‘70s.  Those raises are never enough, and a month later you notice it in your wallet.  You have more money but can afford less.  

Trillions of dollars dumped into the economy out of thin air lowers the value of each dollar.  That is inflation by definition.  We managed to side-step that somewhat in 2021, thanks to GOPers and Joe Manchin in the Senate.  

But the Democrats will try again in 2022, piecemeal.  

2021 turned out to be a pretty good year for investors – and so indirectly for all of us (investors’ money paves the economic road into the future).  The S&P went up almost 27%, closing 2020 at 3,756.07 and closing 2021 at 4,766.18.  That increase is unusually high.  And President Biden and the Democrats in Congress are in no way pro-Capitalist.  Don’t expect a repeat in 2022.

Despite the repercussions of COVID, businesses generally have fairly strong financial standing, and so are growing; that means more jobs and better pay.  But politics trumps economics, and Democrat politics are unabashedly anti-business.  Democrats do not deny that; on the contrary, they brag about it.  

Will the Republicans stay united enough in 2022 to successfully fend off the Democrats’ goals in Congress?  

Do enough Americans understand that the Democrats’ goals are destructive – to them?  Will enough voters represented in Congress by Democrats urge those Democrats to back away from Socialism?

The consequences of increased Socialism are clearly evident, whether you look at history or at conditions in Socialist countries in the world today.  

Education – as always – is crucial to everyone.  Making sure your children are educated is every parent’s responsibility – not the school’s.  The political situation in 2021 and 2022 demonstrates why that is true.  

The U.S. economy is not the issue; 2022 will be a question of what the politicians will do to the economy.■