John Kennedy, Janet Yellen, and the Disastrous Biden Budget - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
John Kennedy, Janet Yellen, and the Disastrous Biden Budget
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I’ve got a video to show you that you probably haven’t seen. It’s 14 minutes long, and it’s from the testimony last week by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at the Senate’s hearing on the Biden budget.

And specifically, Sen. John Kennedy’s grilling of Yellen in that committee hearing.

The thing to understand is that Kennedy has of late been doing to Yellen what he’s frequently done to the Biden administration’s ridiculously unqualified federal judicial nominees. Those eviscerations haven’t destroyed any nominations of late, though Kennedy has put a couple of skins on the wall since Biden took office, but he’s nevertheless doing yeoman work exposing just how awful the diversity hires and ideological disasters getting judicial nominations have been under this president.

For example, Kennedy tore apart a federal magistrate judge from Colorado who’s being nominated for a district judgeship; the magistrate, believe it or not, had no idea what a Brady motion is — those are legal proceedings resulting from the famous 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which held that the prosecution must disclose all exculpatory evidence in a criminal case to the defendant. As this issue has been in the news lately given the case of Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman who’s rotting away in a federal prison despite not actually doing anything especially felonious on Jan. 6, 2021, other than getting a guided tour of the Capitol building by Capitol Police officers before standing in the doorway and exhorting his fellow protesters to go home via bullhorn.

You can’t really get through law school without knowing what a Brady motion is, and yet Team Biden finds people to nominate for federal judgeships who are that clueless.

You wonder why the federal government is such a colossal joke. This is a hint why.

So we need people like John Kennedy to shine the light of accountability on these people, and he did that to Yellen in spades last week…

What’s the big takeaway from this cross-examination?

Well, the most striking thing to take from it is that Team Biden has gone around proclaiming that his budget cuts deficits and the national debt by some $3 trillion, and that’s such a pathetic lie as to make it impossible to ever take any of them seriously again.

Kennedy smokes this out of Yellen. About two and a half minutes in, he gets her to admit that the national debt is now projected to be $33 trillion ($32.7 trillion, to be more specific). And then he gets her to admit that the budget projects that debt to be $51 trillion ($50.7 trillion, to be more exact) 10 years from now.

And Team Biden thinks this is debt reduction.

With a straight face, Janet Yellen tells Kennedy that the national debt would end up larger than $51 trillion in a decade but for the Biden budget, because the $4.7 trillion in new taxes — some $470 billion per year — proposed in the budget cuts down on that deficit.

As Kennedy says, this kind of logic is only possible in Washington, D.C.

So you have a projected $54 trillion in national debt over the next 10 years, based on the completely unsustainable bacchanal of federal spending, and rather than do something to address that number and bring it down — much less seek to pay off the current $32.7 trillion — Team Biden, with Yellen as the Treasury secretary sent out to tout this gibberish, belched up a document that spends a half-trillion more dollars next year than it spent this year.

And Yellen dares to call this “fiscally sustainable.”

She even goes so far as to say that interest rates are historically low, so the interest on a federal debt that is larger than our national economy is no big deal even while the Federal Reserve continues raising interest rates in a vain attempt to fight inflation.

And of course, every time the Fed raises rates, it’s more deficit spending because our “fiscally sustainable” federal government, which wants to blow through $6.9 TRILLION this year, has to service that $32.7 trillion debt. When the rates go up, the debt service goes up — and while Treasury debt is not bank debt, it competes with bank debt for financing, and that drives the price of that debt service.

We already know that a great deal of that $6.9 trillion does almost no good whatsoever for average Americans. It pays people not to work when we have a massive labor shortage, it pumps more fiat money into the economy than there is production to satisfy demand, and it spends money on stupid policies that retard economic productivity in the name of wealth redistribution and “climate change” policy, and it federalizes things like infrastructure spending that are far more appropriately handled at the state and local level, where controls are better and decision-making is more responsive to local needs.

We could cut that federal budget in half and probably get faster GDP growth. We could certainly cut it by a quarter and get a healthier economy along with a shrinking rather than the burgeoning national debt that one day will destroy America as a world superpower and likely will break up our nation.

Kennedy asks Yellen whether she’s a Keynesian, and the answer is a shaky yes. But Yellen doesn’t even know her John Maynard Keynes because when the patron saint of deficit spending wrote his exhortations for governments to borrow money to stimulate a recessionary economy, he also included the caveat that such borrowing must be paid off when the recession is over.

In short, what he smoked out was that Janet Yellen, like most of the rest of the people in charge of governing our economy, is not a serious economist or even much of a student of economics, and is a shaky, if not nonexistent, hand on the tiller.

She’s a disaster, and the Biden budget, which is thankfully dead on arrival in the House, is beyond unserious. It’s a joke.

This administration is a joke, and it is making what was already a nightmarish national economic future far worse.

Kennedy went from the hearing with Yellen to the Senate floor and unleashed this stemwinder of a speech on the budget and the Silicon Valley Bank disaster…

Is this all just hot air? Perhaps. But Americans should know and understand what Joe Biden and Janet Yellen and the rest of the cash-bombers riding on Marine One are doing, because one day in the not-too-distant future these chickens will come home to roost.

And yes, Kennedy’s party has been nothing short of putrid on fiscal matters as well. But there is putrid and then there is suicidal, and the Biden budget Yellen does such a flaccid job of defending is without question the latter.

You might consider calling your congressman and demanding something far more austere than a $6.9 trillion federal orgy.

The Spectacle

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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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