Patrick Boyle

But the problem is that, you know, can those things be rebuilt in an orderly manner is sort of the question.

In most of the Western world and really almost everywhere, there was a decision made that was essentially to leap across that huge hole in the economy.

And so, you know, there's lots of people and, you know, they didn't lose their jobs because of various bailouts.

You know, employers were given in the United States sort of PPP loans or all sorts of things, you know, stimulus checks and so on.

And that's really expensive.

You know, like it's, you know, it was kind of a year and a half, two years worth of

you know largely dead economy and so we leap across that and then there's massive inflation and it's really just that we have to pay the bill for what happened you know like you you can't

You know, you can't ignore the fact that everyone got paid for a couple of years when economic activity was a lot lower than it normally would have been.

Well, you know, it's on the credit card is really what's happened, you know.

So, I mean, and that's even the thing that, you know, it often makes me laugh when people say to me,

about cutting taxes.

And they go, oh, well, the cut in taxes is great.

And it's like, well, the thing is that the tax really happens when the government spends the money.

Once the money's been spent, it's been spent.

And now we're either going to pay what had been taxed today, or we're going to borrow the money and have to pay for it in the future.

And then there's even, you know, there's sort of interest rate arguments around that because, you know, especially a couple of years ago when interest rates were almost zero, like actually, you know, should we borrow the money?

Like kind of at 0% interest, maybe we should.

Like maybe the economy can outgrow the cost of the debt.

But now as interest rates are coming up, and of course, you know, interest rates and inflation relate to each other, you know, you end up with a situation where,

We're looking like around the world, like pretty much every developed country has debt as a percentage of GDP is the highest it's ever been, you know, and prior peaks occurred.