The year 2020 will be remembered as the year when common sense and the little that remained of fiscal responsibility were sacrificed once and for all.
The year 2020 will be remembered as the year when common sense, rationality, and the little that remained of fiscal responsibility and liberty were sacrificed once and for all by career politicians and the pundits that enable them. Public hysteria encouraged unrestrained abuse of the government’s regulatory, monetary, and fiscal powers.
On this December 23, I thought I had seen it all, but I was wrong. It was bad enough that the latest COVID “stimulus” bill failed to demonstrate any sense of proportion and priority. In a last-minute effort by senators Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders, it now includes individual checks to many people with jobs. This inclusion wouldn’t have been possible without all the other “Free-Money Republicans,” as Senator Rand Paul calls those who caved in to their demand. That’s on top of extended unemployment bonuses, bailouts for airlines, Amtrak, the Kennedy Center, and other special interests.
Given that the priority of policy-makers should be dead-set on reopening our economy and overseeing a rapid recovery from the pandemic, you might be naïve in thinking that much of the $908 billion was prioritized for COVID-19 mitigation and the rollout of vaccines. You would be wrong. In fact, 94.4 percent of “COVID relief” spending has nothing to do with pandemic mitigation, vaccine distribution, or vaccine procurement. Clearly, the priority of policymakers is elsewhere.
This Everything Bailout bill, as David Stockman calls it, is to be added to another four since March, giving us a for a total of $4.4 trillion. That’s over 15 times the actual $283 billion of lost wages and salaries during the last eight months. That’s insanity.
But apparently that’s not the end of it. Now Mr. Trump is threatening to block the distribution of that cash, and not sign the bill. You may think that the reason is that he finally woke up to the reality that government spending has to first be extracted from the real economy, or that he now understands that it’s unfair to foist such debt burdens on future generations, or that Republicans aren’t supposed to be as eager to spend as Democrats. But that would be wrong. Instead, he is demanding that the individual checks be $2,000 instead of $600. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) is delighted. Senate minority leader Schumer (D., N.Y.) is, too. That’s what they’ve asking for all along!
To top it all off, that free money was included in a $2.3 trillion spending package, a 5,600 page document that no legislator can possibly have read. Only six Republican senators voted against this spending bill, and for fiscal sanity. They are senators Rand Paul (R., Ky.), Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), Mike Lee (R., Utah), and Rick Scott (R., Fla.).
Where are the objections from free-market conservatives? I guess everyone is a Keynesian and a member of the free-money gang now.