The cartoon in Friday’s OBSERVER, depicting what has become a national train wreck led by the Biden administration hit home on many levels. If you remember the cartoon, the car near the end of the Biden train wreck, marked “inflation” was in flames as the administration’s out of control spending continues to feed the flames of higher costs.

Just this week when my wife returned home from grocery shopping, I asked her if she wanted me to look into an improvement we want to make on our home. She replied that we really should hold off on it until Biden’s inflation finally come under control.

While our economy was probably due for an increase, Biden and Congressional Democrats have driven inflation to a 40- year high because of their out-of-control spending. The so-called Inflation Reduction Act is really a green energy bill providing billions of dollars to politically connected green industries many of which are Chinese. It also provides subsidies to Obama Care, and takes the insane step of raising taxes during a recession by levying a corporate minimum tax on corporations. This tax will not only slow expansion, slow production, and slow the creation of new jobs but because corporations will add the tax to the cost of their products every one of us will help pay it.

One of the darkest elements of the bill weaponizes the IRS by adding 87,000 new employees to be better able to catch tax cheats. The Congressional Budget Office says that ensuring better tax compliance will increase yearly revenue by $300 billion. The culture of the IRS is one in which it is not the wealthy but middle-income self-employed people who are branded as the main group of tax cheats.

Four out of five audits are directed at citizens making $75,000 a year or less. This is done because they cannot afford to fight the IRS. So, watch out they’re coming for you.

My wife and I have seen the price of gasoline fall recently but we also know it will probably go up again when refineries switch over to producing more heating oil as the weather gets colder.

Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act also imposes an approximately 50% increase in the fees imposed on domestic oil producers on federal land so it seems probable that the cost of petroleum products will continue to rise because the Biden administration wants to force us into electric vehicles.

Another car in the Biden train wreck is marked “Student Loan forgiveness.” All I can say is that it’s unfair to graduates like my children and others who paid their loans back or to those who never went to college, or went to a trade school or entered an apprentice program to now make them pay. It’s unfair and a shameless campaign tactic.

If you haven’t watched Fox News then you may not be aware of the disaster occurring on our southern border. Its occurring because the Biden administration has political reasons for allowing it to occur. This fiscal year over 2 million illegals have crossed that border with another 1 million so called “gotaways” who have avoided capture and disappeared into the interior. Already 16 persons on the “terrorist watch list” have been stopped at the border this year making one wonder how many crossed the border undetected and what their plans are.

Also crossing the border are thousands of pounds of the opioid fentanyl and other illegal drugs produced by Mexican drug cartels using ingredients manufactured in China. Fentanyl has led to rapidly increasing deaths from drug overdoses during the last two years and now authorities are faced with fentanyl tablets colored to look like candy. In all its forms, including others drugs laced with fentanyl, it is killing not only habitual drug users but also our young people.

Then there is the car marked “crime.” Increasing crime has turned the streets of many of our cities into battlegrounds where no one is safe. Calls for defunding police by Black Lives Matter and others have led to a loss of respect for the police making them targets for violence. Police morale is at rock bottom causing veteran officers to take early retirement, move to suburban departments or just to leave the profession. The problem only gets worse because these departments are finding it difficult to hire replacements

The ongoing crime wave has been aided by the institution of low or no bail policies in various cities and states like New York. Criminals can commit a crime and be back on the streets within 24 hours. I see this as an attempt by people like billionaire George Soros to breakdown our society so that individuals like him can come in and pick up the pieces.

Attorney General Merrick Garland showed a willful disrespect for our laws when he did nothing to enforce the laws protecting the homes of Supreme Court Justices when progressive pro-abortion protesters marched in front of the homes of conservative justices following the early release of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This sadly led to an assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Despite all the reckless propaganda from progressives regarding the court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, telling us that women are losing control over their bodies, or that abortions are again being forced into the shadows, all the decision did was to return the issue to the individual states where a quick reading of the Constitution by any literate person will show that is where the decisions on abortion must be made.

That’s my view of Bidens “train wreck.” There are other cars that could have been added like Afghanistan, China, COVID-19, or the irresponsible Iranian Nuclear Deal but what we have now is disturbing enough.

Thomas Kirkpatrick Sr. is a Silver Creek resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com