In a recent appearance on Sky News, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was pressed on whether the United States could afford to devote resources to the conflicts in both Ukraine and Israel. Praising the American economy, Yellen bluntly replied that “America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel’s military needs and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia.”

Yellen’s remarks come at a time when the latest US annual deficit has crested to an eye-popping $2 trillion. Indeed, President Joe Biden may be facing the same “guns and butter” tension that perplexed his Democratic predecessor Lyndon Baines Johnson. In the Sixties, Johnson poured money into both the Vietnam War (“guns”) and the Great Society expansion of the welfare state at home (“butter”). And it was LBJ’s fiscal policies that helped contribute to the inflation of the late Sixties and Seventies, which resulted in pushing the US off the gold standard.

Biden may now be grappling with his own version of this challenge.

[True, but Biden is hardly alone on that error. Every president and every Congress since Nixon ended the gold standard has made the same error. Every one of them except Trump has done so while claiming to be some kind of deficit hawk, too. (Trump famously rejected debt concerns during his campaign and didn’t make much of an issue of them during his presidency either.) Biden is becoming the most extreme example of this, but that may be just because he’s the current (p)resident at the White House. — Ed]