Hey, Joey, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. If things go wrong on your watch, then you are the guy that gets the blame.

In other words, when illegal immigrants storm the border on Joey’s watch, it’s Joey’s fault. When inflation bursts out on Joey’s watch, it’s Joey’s fault. When Saigon 2.0 happens in Afghanistan on Joey’s watch, it’s Joey’s fault.

That’s how the world works. When something goes wrong on your watch, it’s your fault.

Battalions of center-left intellectuals will doubtless be crowding the pages of the New York Times to prove that the Border Crisis is really the strange fruit of systemic racism; that inflation is the fault of homophobic 4Chan memes; that the Afghan disaster is all Trump’s fault. No doubt they are right. But all these disasters are happening on President Biden’s watch, so it’s his fault.

Are you really sure that you guys were that smart when you absolutely did not steal the election last November? Imagine the fun you would be having right now with the border, with inflation, with Afghanistan if Trump were president!

If Trump were president, you could have battalions of activists sniffing out more kids in cages; you could be blaming Trump for the inflation; and I dare say that any Afghan pullout on Trump’s watch would have ended up just as bad as the Biden pullout. And then your devoted activists and their patented, mostly peaceful protests could have been protesting night day and morning about the injustice of ending the rent moratorium and the mortgage moratorium and the student debt payment moratorium. But now it’s all on Biden’s watch.

And then: the 2022 midterms might have been the biggest rejection of a second-term president in history, with Dems reaching Rooseveltian majorities in each House, and the normal change election of 2024 would have been a rout! I’m sure that any wise educated and evolved ruling class would have followed that strategy in getting rid of the literally-Hitler President Trump the smart way and founding a glorious new progressive dynasty that would last for a thousand years.

Oh well. If wishes were horses, oppressed peoples would rule.

Look, Joey boy, I feel for you. You must feel a bit like Senator John Yerkes Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate, totally confused by the ever-changing number of Communists in the Defense Department. So, in my recent analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), beloved of Sandy O, I have tried to make it “real simple” for you and your administration in my one-page review of government finance down the ages, Stage One to Stage Eight.

The “real simple” strategy for you, Joey boy, is what I call Schachtian Economics, after Hjalmar Schacht, the guy that ended the German hyperinflation after World War I in one day. Do you know how he did it? He simply stopped printing so much money.

That is what you, or your successor, will have to do when every last Ocasio-Cortez in the land finally recognizes that MMT is a total disaster that will have devastated the average American and the various Oppressed Peoples of which we’ve heard tell. However, I predict that the writers at the New York Times and the censors at Big Tech will insist that blaming MMT is dangerous extremism and “disinformation” and armed insurrection. But MMT probably will not devastate the upper-class global educated elite. Because they are special.

But I have a request of you, Joey boy and all the chaps at Dem Central. When all this is over, and we have elected a solid Republican president and Congress and the inflation and subsequent recession is over and it is Morning in America once again, and you guys are figuring out who is going to be the New Democrat that has really, really changed -- honest, we really mean it this time -- could we please negotiate a new era in U.S. politics? Just for a few years? We’ll all agree not to put pedal to the metal on spending, or on climate change, or CRT, or on soak the rich. Oh, we’ll all keep up the rhetoric, but in the corridors of power, it’ll be nod-nod-wink-wink, say-no-more.

What I am suggesting is a replay of the years after World War II, when we reduced gross federal debt from 119 percent of GDP in 1946 to 60 percent of GDP in 1956, and nobody said a thing. How did we do it? Well, inflation was over 10 percent for a few years in the late 1940s, and the federal debt stayed at about $250-260 billion until well into the 1950s. That really did a job on debt as a percent of GDP.

We could do it again, if the fix is in. Then, after a few years, we could get back to spend-and-elect. Although I hope that our grandchildren will say: Daddy, do we have to?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: A1C Veronica Fiullwood, Picryl 

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