From Kevin Williamson at National Review – Real Trouble:

There are a number of important factors that drive real-wage performance. The urgent and critical problem right now is — unusually — one that is mostly within the power of policy-makers to manage, and that is destructive inflation, driven in part by recklessly large increases in federal spending, including covert spending in the form of government credit and credit subsidies. That latter factor is larger than you might expect: The federal government already has more than $5 trillion in loans on its books, a loan portfolio that would make it the largest bank in the world if it were a bank. Subsidized credit is the coward’s way of spending money on friends and cronies, because spending-by-lending allows you to list these subsidies as “assets” on your books rather than characterizing them as spending. The Manchin–Schumer bill advertised as reducing inflation will actually make the situation worse, by piling hundreds of billions in new lending and loan guarantees onto the federal ledger.

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