Running for re-election, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy proposes that the federal government spend $4 billion over four years to provide free summer camp to poor children. Connecticut might get $40 million of that.

"Outside experiences, adventure experiences, summer experiences where you get to improve your socialization skills, where you have your mind opened to new possibilities, new hobbies, new interests — it's necessary," Murphy says. "It's a tough time to be a kid. It's a tough time to be a parent. So we have to make sure that when our kids leave school for the summer they don't lose access to learning and socialization."

The senator seems to figure that it's not a tough time to be a taxpayer, since he did not propose any revenue source for free summer camp. But then no member of Congress or presidential candidate bothers with revenue sources anymore for the goodies they propose. It is just assumed that the federal government — and increasingly state governments, recipients of ever-more federal largesse — can have infinite free stuff, financed by borrowing, the issuance of bonds whose interest increasingly will be paid by more borrowing, and that the foreign governments and investors who purchase many of these bonds will never worry about the insolvency.

But they are already worrying about it and reducing their purchases.

Murphy's proposal hints at two big problems.

First is that too much spending without taxing — that is, creation of too much money and debt, far out of proportion to the country's economic production — causes inflation. That's where the ruinous inflation of the last several years has come from. It didn't begin with the recent virus epidemic, but it was turbocharged by the government's response, which stopped people from working and gave them free money instead.

Now elected officials are addicted to spending without taxing. This week Murphy and Connecticut's senior senator, Richard Blumenthal, announced that they aim to include in the next federal appropriations bill almost $77 million in grants to dozens of municipal government and community organization projects. There are no particular standards for these grants. They are the personal political patronage of the senators.

So the senators will get the thanks while most people keep wondering where inflation comes from and why the rising cost of necessities keeps outpacing their incomes and making their lives harder.

The second problem with the money-for-nothing approach of Murphy's free summer camp idea is that it distracts from the big failures of life in the United States while purporting to address them.

Democrats particularly are claiming spectacular success for the administration of their president, Joe Biden, whom they frantically just pushed into retirement because of his equally spectacular unpopularity. The Democrats say Biden has been the best president in decades. So why is this, as Senator Murphy says, such a tough time to be a kid or a parent?

Judging from Murphy's proposal and others, poverty in the United States is increasing, not being reduced. More people can't support themselves and their families and so they clamor for government to provide more free or subsidized stuff — child care, food, rent, electricity, heating fuel, treatment for the increased levels of mental illness and drug addiction, college loan forgiveness, and so forth, along with many new or expanded social programs.

Then there are the subsidies for illegal immigrants, whose housing needs drive up rents and whose labor drives down wages.

Why are real incomes falling for many people, though government data strives to conceal this by sharply understating inflation? Apart from inflation arising from money for nothing, falling real incomes also may have something to do with the destruction of the family under the perverse incentives of the welfare system and with public education's descent into social promotion, whereby many young people reach adulthood horribly under-educated and prepared only for menial work.

So is government's objective now a self-sufficient and prosperous population or an impoverished one permanently dependent on government? Money for nothing well may have that result, letting elected officials pose as heroes even as the country sinks.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.