Democrats released a laughable new “coronavirus” spending bill Tuesday that would rain trillions of future taxpayers’ money on an already bloated and incompetent federal government. More than anything else, it’s proof Democrats are an unserious party unfit to govern at all, let alone in a time of crisis.
The bill was initially dubbed CARES 2 Act and rapidly renamed the HEROES Act, as if it’s heroic to dump other people’s money out the window after taking it at gunpoint. It would expand by billions of dollars the spending of just about every government agency, most of which Americans don’t even know exist, and very few of which have anything to do with treating the disease.
While 33 million Americans are out of work and taking handouts from their own children to make ends meet, House Democrats would give billions more dollars to bureaucrats who already have much higher salaries, benefits, and job security than comparable private-sector workers. This is despicable.
A bipartisan Congress has already fed trillions it doesn’t have to numerous agencies in the name of coronavirus. Well before this panic, the United States was edging closer to a spending-induced economic meltdown due to decades of congressional mismanagement. This bill would only worsen that calamity, without proof any one of its measures will reduce the coronavirus death toll, endangering the tens of millions of Americans with other health concerns who depend on fiscally unsustainable medical welfare such as Medicaid and Medicare.
An Attempt to Snooker Gullible Republicans
Congressional Republican leaders, who are generally no obstacle to deficit spending, this time have responded to House Democrats’ crazy wishlist with a big middle finger. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell essentially said the bill will go nowhere in his chamber, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been doing media rounds slamming the bill as the farce it is.
So it’s not clear what benefit Pelosi gets from releasing this pie-in-the-sky bill, except perhaps as an attempt to throw her ascendant far-left caucus a bone. She may also be using her typically effective tactic of proposing something obviously insane to shift the Overton Window towards Democrats’ ultimate end goal of socialism. In other words, it’s an opening bid, designed both to prove to her far-left that she can’t get from Republicans what she doesn’t really want due to current electoral realities, and to define negotiations with Republicans in terms favorable to even bigger government.
2) Former White House Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew spoke to House Democrats on their conference call yesterday, pushing them to “go big.” Fox is told Lew made the argument that interest rates were low and spending this much money would never be cheaper.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) May 12, 2020
If that’s the case, Pelosi is really trying to box Republicans into bailing out states while gullibly telling constituents they got a better deal from Democrats for it, when really states should be bailing themselves out by reopening their economies and slashing burdens on enterprise, cutting their governments that are bigger than at any time in American history and provide very poor outcomes for all their spending, and tapping their record-high rainy day funds.
While this happens all over the country, Congress uses COVID-19 to push political wish lists and the media pretend their petty Trump dust-ups are the big story.
It's so messed up. https://t.co/a0Y2E0IUSr
— Kylee Griswold (@kyleezempel) May 12, 2020
Governors in states like New Jersey and Illinois also appear to be hoarding coronavirus money Congress has already sent. Congress is fumbling oversight over the $3.6 trillion it has already thrown at coronavirus. Taxpayers in more fiscally responsible states don’t owe spendthrift states one penny. And no new money should be sent anywhere it won’t be used honestly.
We Americans have all been gifted a great country through people who put more into it than they got out, at least until the Baby Boomers came along. Americans shouldn’t hide in our homes fumbling in our childrens’ pockets for money like drunkards.
Like the greatest generation, we owe it to our nation to face danger bravely. Our ancestors risked much worse to give us the best country in the world: cholera outbreaks, amputations without anesthesia, hand-to-paw combat with bears and panthers, natives who ruled territory through slavery and torture, establishing homes in a forbidding wilderness amid outbreaks of starvation and disease, volunteering to fight from poisoned foxholes, perilous trips in rickety ships across a dark ocean.
We are clearly not better than them. But we should strive to be. Like them, we need to provide for the next generation more than we’ve been given, not less, and to do it the honorable way: through work and prayer. In contrast, Democrats’ vision for America is one of cowards who hide from danger and cheat posterity rather than accept even serious risks in the pursuit of something much greater: an abundant future for us, our children, and our neighbors.
This Bill Is a Farce
Besides a $1 trillion bailout for state and local governments, the bill contains, according to the Associated Press:
a fresh round of $1,200 direct cash aid to individuals, increased to up to $6,000 per household, and launches a $175 billion housing assistance fund to help pay rents and mortgages. There is $75 billion more for virus testing.
It would continue, through January, the $600-per-week boost to unemployment benefits. It adds a 15% increase for food stamps and new help for paying employer-backed health coverage. For businesses, it provides an employee retention tax credit.
There’s $200 billion in ‘hazard pay’ for essential workers on the front lines of the crisis.
Would also give bigger bailouts to states that have more unemployed people, i.e. kept their economies locked down longer.
— Joy Pullmann (@JoyPullmann) May 12, 2020
The bill would also bail out the U.S. Postal Service with $25 billion without requiring any long-needed internal reforms, give a huge tax break to millionaires in blue states, spike voter fraud in 2020 elections by requiring mail-in ballots with no voter ID, release illegal entrants to the United States, send $100 billion to bail out large hospitals at the expense of smaller ones getting crushed by coronavirus shutdowns, and give coronavirus helicopter cash to foreign citizens who are illegally inside the United States.
It would also send $10 million each to the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, not exactly agencies positioned for coronavirus treatment. The bill would give the Environmental Protection Agency $50 million for “environmental justice grants,” $1.5 billion to closed schools and libraries for internet access even though almost everyone in America owns an internet-accessible smartphone, $21 million extra to “fish and wildlife management,” and $300 million for towns to hire new police officers — because this has anything to do with coronavirus.
Bring Out Your Lobbyists
No wonder lobbying spending reached a near-record of almost $1 trillion in the first quarter of 2020 as special interests fought for a government teat, according the the Center for Responsive Politics. “Among all non-appropriations bills introduced since 2005, only the 2009 stimulus package drew more lobbying clients,” the center says.
This would explain why Congress has so far spent more than $3.6 trillion in “emergency” “coronavirus” spending, enough for every American to get more than $11,000 each (on top of any of the dozens of welfare programs they might be on, like unemployment, Medicaid, or food stamps). Instead, what they actually got was an average of $760 each in “economic impact payments.”
In other words, less than one-tenth of Congress’s already-passed coronavirus “stimulus” went directly to Americans — many of whom, like my family, didn’t even need it — and more than nine-tenths went elsewhere: businesses, nonprofits, special interests. Nine-tenths. That explains the lobbying.
Pelosi’s caucus is looking to keep that special interest gravy train flowing, while chucking the average American another deficit-funded check like red meat to a dog they’re trying to get off their trail. They must think Americans are that stupid and easily bought off.
They might be right. Americans haven’t tossed enough bums out of Congress to get our fiscal house in order for more than half a century. On the other hand, the 2009 “stimulus” spending binge enraged millions of Americans and started the Tea Party.