The latest NPR/Marist poll finds major warning signs for President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats.

According to NPR:

Americans don’t feel the direct payments or expanded child tax credits doled out earlier this year helped them much, and they don’t see Democrats’ signature legislation as addressing their top economic concern — inflation.

Additionally, they’re down on the job President Biden is doing, don’t give him much credit for the direct payments or tax credits, and have soured on the direction of the country.

The results, out Thursday, come as Democrats prepare a nationwide push to sell voters on their policies ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, when the party will defend its slim majorities in both the House and the Senate.

“They [Democrats] don’t have a unified message for what they’re doing, and that does not bode well for the party,” said Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll.

The president’s approval rating was just 42% in this survey, tied with a late November poll for the lowest Marist had found since Biden took office.

Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said, “It’s an issue of the messaging out of the White House.”

It’s not a messaging problem. It’s a policy problem. Socialism doesn’t work. Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Biden and his fellow Democrats’ socialist spending spree has led to crippling inflation. Democrats thought they could buy people’s votes. But the truth is, handouts are not sustainable. They incentivize people to stay home until the money runs out, which it always does. Not only does it leave them broke and unemployed, but they now have to deal with inflation.

For the past 18 months, my 23-year-old daughter was loving all her “Stimie” cash. I kept warning her it was like eating candy — sure, you like it in the moment, but boy do you regret it later on! Now she’s calling me to complain that she can’t afford gas for her car. She has forgotten what she bought with her “Stimie” cash and now only sees higher prices everywhere she shops. And it’s not just her. It’s all Americans.

Americans are waking up to the cold hard facts: There is no free lunch. Eventually the bill has to be paid.

Six month ago, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he predicted the inflation crisis we are now experiencing.

The reality is that the federal government does not itself feel the consequences of [deficit spending]. The people do.

We’ve known for a long time that this was presenting something of a threat to future generations, something that we knew would really come to haunt our children and our grandchildren and their children after them. We’ve always known this, but at the rate when we’ve accelerated our massive deficit spending and the degree to which we’ve extended it this is no longer just a problem for the future. This is affecting us right now. It’s now reached its hand into our wallets to our families and into our day-to-day lives. What happens when too many dollars are produced out of thin air when we just print more money? I know there’s an intermediate step there. Technically it’s borrowed money. The money that we don’t have isn’t just printed, it is borrowed as the U.S treasury bills are sold. We borrow that money knowing that we’re going to have to pay it back later. But it has the effect of just printing more money.

When we just print more money, those dollars which have now multiplied, they’re still chasing more or less the same quantity of goods. That means the same quantity of goods with more dollars results in each of those goods being able to command a higher price. When you dump more money into the economy doesn’t make things easier for people, it just raises the costs. This hurts poor and middle-class Americans especially hard. It hurts those who are living on a fixed income on a fixed wage or salary.

In the late November NPR/Marist poll, respondents said their top economic concern was inflation, but in this latest survey, people were pessimistic that either of Biden’s spending bills would help.

According to NPR, “‘They’re [Democrats] not connecting the dots between concern about inflation and what’s happening in Washington, either with the infrastructure bill or Build Back Better,’ Carvalho said, who said this should ‘absolutely’ be a red flag for the party.”

Democrats have spent months repeating the message that their legislation will not add to the deficit or worsen inflation. In an address from the White House in October, Biden called the plans fiscally responsible policies to help the country grow.

“They don’t add a single penny to the deficit,” he said. “And they don’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact, they reduce the deficit.”

No one is buying that. They can’t.