Commentary: Trouble paying your bills? Meet the culprit

If you’re having trouble paying your bills today – much less saving any money – you’re not alone.

The average savings rate in June was down to just 3.4%. That’s less than half the pre-pandemic rate and almost two-thirds below the long-run average of about 8.5%. Besides 2022, that’s the lowest rate since the 2008 financial crisis and America’s Great Recession.

But it’s not your fault. It’s the direct result of a bloated federal budget squeezing out the family budget. And you can blame Washington, D.C., for that.

While both political parties are to blame for overspending, the two biggest culprits over the last 31/2 years have been President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. They’ve led a reckless spending spree that has increased the federal debt by $7.4 trillion and burned through another $1 trillion of cash at the Treasury during their time in office.

Those trillions in runaway spending have been financed with borrowed money, much of it created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. This gave the Treasury more dollars to spend, but everyone’s dollar lost value. It’s like pouring water into whiskey – it increases the volume of liquid, but it also decreases the whiskey’s proof.

The trillions of dollars in government spending, borrowing and creating money caused the dollar to lose one-fifth of its value in less than four years while also pushing up interest rates. The deadly combination of higher prices and higher borrowing costs has caused the monthly mortgage payment on a median price home to double since Biden and Harris took office.

While Biden has rightly been blamed for his inflationary economic agenda, Harris is just as responsible for the cost-of-living crisis.

As vice president, she presides over the U.S. Senate and can cast tiebreaking votes, which she has done more than any other vice president in history. Harris bears disproportionate responsibility for the fallout from this administration’s legislative agenda because she has done so much to ram it through a divided Congress.

Both the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan Act were stalled in the Senate until Harris broke each tie to ensure they both became law. These were two of the three largest spending bills of the Biden administration, and they added trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Harris was also a supporter of every other major spending bill signed into law by Biden, all of which supercharged inflation, pushing up prices at the fastest pace in over 40 years. By January 2025, the Biden-Harris administration will have increased the federal debt and decreased the Treasury’s cash on hand by more than any other administration in history.

But this fiscal mismanagement has destroyed family finances just as much as federal finances. American families are drowning in $1.1 trillion of credit card debt and paying over $240 billion annually on those outstanding balances.

Most Americans today don’t even have an emergency fund to cover an unexpected expense like a refrigerator dying, a transmission going out or an emergency room bill. So many young adults can’t afford to make it on their own today that they are having to live with their parents at the highest rate since 1940 – the Great Depression.

This cost-of-living crisis was caused by the failed public policy that Biden and Harris have implemented over the last three and a half years. Profligate spending in Washington has made it a struggle just to put gas in the tank and groceries in the back seat. Americans can’t escape this reality any more than Biden or Harris can escape culpability for it.

E.J. Antoni is a public finance economist and the Richard F. Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.