Justin Haskins: COVID relief bill is reckless, disgusting – who will save our economy?
After everything we’ve experienced in 2020, I guess nothing should surprise me
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Just when you thought Washington couldn’t possibly be more reckless and wasteful, it found a way.
Late on Monday evening, Congress passed, with strong bipartisan support, a $900 billion coronavirus relief bill and $1.4 trillion spending bill, averting a looming government shutdown and extending coronavirus relief measures put into place in March under the CARES Act.
The bills included a long list of disgustingly wasteful spending provisions, foreign aid and pet projects, including millions of dollars for monitoring climate change in Tibet, cash for investigating the 1908 Springfield Race Riot and $10 million for "gender programs" in Pakistan.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Congress even agreed to spend $231 million to help Sudan pay down its national debt — a particularly ironic waste of taxpayer money, considering that the United States is now more than $27.5 trillion in the hole. (And, apparently, Congress isn’t done digging.)
TRUMP’S CALL FOR $2,000 STIMULUS CHECKS HAILED – BY CRITICS PELOSI, AOC, SANDERS
But while nearly everything in the bills ought to be heavily scrutinized, the one provision that deserves the most criticism is Congress’s decision to send another round of stimulus checks to most Americans, including millions of people who have not lost their jobs as a result of the government lockdowns imposed to slow the COVID-19 pandemic.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Under the provisions in the legislation, adults who earned less than $75,000 in 2019 would receive a $600 payment from the government. Couples who earned less than $150,000 would receive $1,200.
Individuals who earned more than $75,000 and couples who earned more than $150,000 would receive lower amounts, until income reaches $87,000 for individuals and $174,000 for couples, at which point payments would be phased out completely.
Sending people "stimulus" checks when government refuses to allow much of the economy to operate normally is not only a fool’s errand, it’s cronyism at its worst.
Sending hundreds of billions of dollars to tens of millions of people who don’t need it would be incredibly reckless under any economic conditions, but this provision, which is meant to "stimulate" the economy, is particularly outrageous considering that much of the U.S. economy is still closed, and some cities and states have recently made moves to further restrict economic activity.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Sending people "stimulus" checks when government refuses to allow much of the economy to operate normally is not only a fool’s errand, it’s cronyism at its worst, as those who stand to benefit the most from the payments are massive corporations like Amazon, which has unquestionably been one of the pandemic’s biggest winners.
On Tuesday, President Trump called the legislation a "disgrace" and blasted Congress, including many in his own party, for agreeing to spend truckloads of cash on countless unnecessary projects, including many overseas, while American families and small businesses are suffering.
FOR CORONAVIRUS RELIEF, TRUMP DEMANDS CONGRESS INCREASE DIRECT PAYMENTS TO AMERICANS
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}But what seemed at first to be a brief moment of sanity quickly took a turn for the worse, when President Trump called on Congress to increase stimulus spending.
"I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000, or $4,000 for a couple," Trump said.
The far-left wing of the Democratic Party, which has long been arguing for larger stimulus payments, immediately seized the moment, with socialist members of the "Squad" openly calling for Congress to adopt President Trump’s proposal.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Let’s do it," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. "@RashidaTlaib and I already co-wrote the COVID amendment for $2,000 checks, so it’s ready to go. Glad to see the President is willing to support our legislation. We can pass $2k checks this week if the Senate GOP agrees to stand down."
Democratic Party leadership quickly signed on.
"I’m in," wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Twitter. "Whaddya say, Mitch [McConnell]? Let’s not get bogged down with ideological offsets and unrelated items and just DO THIS! The American people deserve it."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Democrats are now working to secure a vote to increase stimulus payments by unanimous consent on the floor of the House on Christmas Eve day, putting Republicans in the terrible position of having to either torpedo the long-awaited relief bill at Christmas or agree to spend hundreds of billions more, further upsetting the party’s conservative base.
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After everything we’ve experienced in 2020, I guess nothing should surprise me, but I’ve got to admit that I never thought I’d see the day that President Trump would be helping socialists in Congress force Republican congressional leadership to agree to send thousands of dollars to millions of people who haven’t lost their jobs.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}More from Opinion
This episode is evidence that Washington is now totally devoid of any reason or common sense, never mind fiscal restraint. The president and Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, have so lost their way and slid into the abyss of modern monetary theory — an economic theory long advanced by the far left that insists debts and deficits don’t matter — that it appears the country has been put on an irreversible course toward economic calamity.
Governments can’t print trillions upon trillions of dollars without causing inflation to skyrocket, crushing economic stagnation or both. It is a certainty that the entire country will soon have to grapple with, and when it does, the cost of returning to policies that have even a shred of fiscal sanity will be steep and painful.
In Venezuela, similarly foolish money-printing policies led to inflation rates topping 65,000% in 2018, laying waste to what used to be one of South America’s wealthiest economies.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}In Japan, one of the world’s most indebted nations, GDP has remained stagnant for more than two decades. In fact, the country’s GDP in 2019 was lower than the country’s total GDP in 1995. (Over the same period, U.S. GDP increased by nearly $14 trillion.)
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Unfortunately, the United States appears to be on track to face a similar fate.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Congress, now with the help of President Trump, is killing the American economy, the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known. And if we don’t reverse course immediately, there will be no stopping the country’s decline.