The $6 Trillion Illusion: America’s 2020 Bailout Bill Comes Due
When the world shut down in 2020, Washington reached for its favorite cure-all: print and spend.
Nearly $6 trillion in new money flooded the system — banks, Wall Street, local governments — with a few “stimulus” checks tossed to households to keep the peace.
It felt like salvation. In reality, it was a delayed reckoning.
For decades, capitalism had a self-correcting rule: weak businesses fail, strong ones endure. But since the 1980s, failure has been nationalized — first oil loans, then Wall Street in 2008, and finally, the entire economy in 2020.
Now the invoice has arrived:
📈 Inflation at 40-year highs
💰 Debt growing faster than the economy
📉 Markets fueled by liquidity, not productivity
Instead of owning the cause, officials pointed fingers — at “supply chains,” “Russia,” and “corporate greed.” Convenient scapegoats for a deeper truth: you can’t print prosperity.
Money printing doesn’t create wealth — it borrows from the future, siphoning purchasing power until the illusion collapses.
2020 wasn’t a rescue mission. It was a reset with interest — and that interest is finally coming due.
Source: Mises Institute