Economist Steve Forbes, chair and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, told Newsmax on Thursday the Biden administration is not doing enough to help a sluggish U.S. economy turn around.
On Monday, the Treasury Department announced it will be borrowing $776 billion over the final months of this year and another $816 billion in the first three months of 2024. The announcement came about a week after the government said the fiscal year 2023 budget deficit would be about $1.7 trillion, an increase of about $320 billion from the 2022 fiscal year.
Forbes told "Rob Schmitt Tonight" guest host Lara Trump, daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump, that adding almost $1.6 trillion in government debt to an economy battling high inflation, housing, and consumer prices is not sustainable.
"Not when you have a weak economy," he said. "Not when you have people worried about the future. Not when you have businesses not making the investments they should make. That's new debt, that $1.6 trillion in the next two quarters. Next year, you also have more than $4 trillion of existing debt that has to be refinanced. You have to go back to the markets.
"You have $6-plus trillion coming on the market. That's going to put a real strain on interest rates. But more importantly, it's taking resources away from the American people, who could put that money to productive use instead of the huge, wasteful spending that you're getting in this administration."
In the past 12 months, consumer prices have risen 3.7% even though inflation has cooled from its 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, and wages haven't kept pace with inflation. Interest rates for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in October reached 8%, the highest level in 20 years, according to Mortgage News Daily, before settling down to 7.51%. Mortgage News Daily also reported existing home sales fell to the lowest levels in more than a decade.
High interest rates are a reason consumer real estate is shrinking to historically low levels, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"Inflation went up when Joe Biden took office," Forbes said. "It was 1.5% when a certain other president [Trump] left office in January 2021. The big, bad thing out there is that regulators want to put on new capital requirements for banks, which is going to hurt bank lending at a time when we need more of it.
"... The Biden administration seems to be doing everything possible to make it hard for the American economy to revive. But we know the formula; it's been tried before. The formula for success in an economy: low taxes, deregulation, encouraging energy production."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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