Bert's Thoughts

The following is some information to let you decide how Bidenomics is working for you. When President Biden took office on January 20, 2021 the national debt was  $27,752 billion ($216,000 per US household). The national debt has now blown through $33,700 billion ($248,000 per US household) and it is growing at an astronomical rate. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the annual deficit will never again be less than $1.5 trillion. For FY2023 the federal government spent $6.134 trillion, State and Local governments spent another $3.33 trillion. Government had to spend at a rate of $10,800 million every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to spend that much.Do we really need that much government? Only 16.2 percent of FY2023 spending went for military defense, civil defense, veterans, foreign military aid, foreign economic aid, military research and development, police and fire services, and prisons.  FY2023 taxes collected were virtually equal to FY2019 spending, but ...

Much is constantly said about people's dire financial straits. On July 29th Vice President Kamala Harris told an audience, “Most Americans are a $400 unexpected expense away from bankruptcy.” According to the Fed’s 2022 Economic Well-Being of US Households survey, 37 percent of Americans lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense, up from 32 percent in 2021. When I hear comments like this I have to wonder if the majority of US citizens are as fiscally irresponsible as the politicians in DC. The national unemployment rate has not exceeded 4 percent since November 2021. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, real (inflation adjusted) median annual household income set new all-time highs in 2016 ($70,840), 2017 ($72,090), 2018 ($73,030) and peaked in 2019 at $78,250. After the federal government started paying people to stay home it dropped to $74,580 by 2022. Massive increases in federal deficits caused inflation to skyrocket after 2020, this helped erode real household...

 California, Missouri The 11/01/23 California Democrat article on updating California’s wastewater plant was interesting. The article mentions that the city has received a $20 million grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources; I suspect that a substantial portion of that money was funded by the $2 trillion dollar 2023 federal deficit, more debt and higher interest payments piled on the shoulders of all future generations. I live in rural Cole County, why are my tax dollars funding improvements to the California water and sewer systems? If I built a home in a rural area I would be expected to pay the cost of installing and maintaining my utilities; water, sewer, electricity, etc. Should several households choose to band together and build, as part of a homeowners association, part of their investment would fund   providing utilities for the group of homes. Supposedly there would be some “economies of scale”; the cost of utilities allocated to each homeowner woul...

  We are in a period of “full employment”, 3.8 percent unemployment and 9.6 million unfilled job openings at the end of September, why do we need ever increasing amounts of “help” from the government? Why is it that politicians' answer to everything is “Let’s spend more borrowed money.”. I asked my state senator (Mike Bernskoetter) and my state representative (Rudy Veit) to tell me how much Missouri spends on Medicaid, neither bothered to respond so I tried to dig the numbers out of Missouri budgets. I apologize in advance if I misinterpreted the information. The earliest data I found was for FY2016. In 2016 Missouri’s Department of Social Services spent $8,392,884,352, of that $7,199,185,240 was spent by the MO HealthNet Division, of that $ 7,098,195,810 was allocated as a Medicaid expenditure ($1,357,868,968 of the Medicaid expenditures was funded from the General Fund). Total Missouri expenditures for the year were $24,627,837,921. FY2022 was the last year for which I could find...