Former President Joe Biden left a terrible legacy: the border catastrophe, chaos and disorder abroad, increased crime, oppressive wokeness. But for today’s purposes, consider the damage done by Biden’s economic policies.

Inflation took away 20% of people’s purchasing power in a short period of time. Even when the rate of inflation slowed, it is still, right now, rising faster than economists — or anybody else — are comfortable with. This week, there will be new numbers for inflation in January, and the message again will be that Biden brought inflation on but was unable to fully get rid of it. Now that is President Donald Trump’s job.

Then there is federal spending. Biden and his Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill went crazy with spending. Coming off the already-high emergency COVID spending of the final year of the first Trump administration, Biden and congressional Democrats poured trillions of dollars unnecessarily into the economy.

First, Congress passed a $900 billion “COVID relief” bill just after Christmas 2020, as Trump was heading out the door. Biden, then president-elect, strongly supported it. Once Biden was in the White House, he pushed Democrats to pass his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021.

One-point-nine trillion dollars. Did the economy really need a stimulus of that size? It was pretty clear, even at the time, that it did not. A month before it was passed, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote that, given the $900 billion stimulus that had already been passed, “the gap between actual and potential output [of the economy] will decline from about $50 billion a month at the beginning of the year to $20 billion a month at its end. The proposed [American Rescue Plan] stimulus will total in the neighborhood of $150 billion a month. … That is at least three times the size of the output shortfall.”

Biden and the Democratic Party decided to pass the bill anyway, spending $150 billion a month to fix a $20 billion a month problem. That much money flooding the economy was going to worsen inflation.

But Biden, who fantasized about being a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, did not stop there. Later in 2021, he signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill — this one made possible in part by a minority of House and Senate Republicans who joined Democrats in supporting it.

And then Biden took aim at what would be the biggest spending extravaganza ever — the proposed $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act. It would spend on everything: climate change, housing assistance, welfare, Medicaid, everything.

With inflation raging, still going up, and millions suffering, it was an act of supreme cynicism to call a bill that would make things worse the Inflation Reduction Act. But that is what Biden and his Democratic allies did, passing the bill in August 2022.

Only now are we learning the true damage the Inflation Reduction Act did. Biden and Democrats passed money faster than anyone could possibly use it, and even though they raced to shovel cash out the door in December and January, many billions remain unspent. President Trump has put a freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funds, and there could be a fight over it in Congress.

But none of that changes the final conclusion. Joe Biden, imagining himself to be FDR, did enormous damage to Americans’ standard of living. They will be suffering a Biden hangover for a long time to come.