Brookline, Massachusetts, invented a great new way to waste the federal government’s blowout pandemic spending.
The Boston suburb is using funding from the American Rescue Plan to purchase 10 Fiberglas turkey statues and hire artists to paint them, according to CBS Boston. The town will then place the painted statues around the community.
Brookline will pay the artists $1,000 to paint these turkeys in one of four American Rescue Plan-funded art projects it is funding this year. Additionally, Brookline is spending $100,000 on murals and $1,500 to have artists paint utility boxes, according to the town’s website.
This is the latest example of a Democratic community grossly wasting inflation-inducing coronavirus stimulus money.
Brookline is a deep blue town in one of the bluest states in America. The town puts menstrual products in the men’s bathroom at Town Hall, and its public high school won a girls’ track state championship last year with the help of a male athlete.
Similarly, Northampton, Massachusetts, wasted $20,000 of American Rescue Plan Act money on five custom-made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles manhole covers across the city.
The original Mirage Studios, which invented the comic book series, was in Northampton. However, that does not justify wasting taxpayer dollars on something so frivolous. Brookline and Northampton, both wealthy communities, could likely find people to waste their money voluntarily on these endeavors. If not, they could both go without this waste.
To give one an idea of how liberal Northampton is, it’s one of eight sanctuary cities in Massachusetts, and the city has its own reparations task force.
The city of Boston is spending $4 million this school year on a tuition-free community college program that covers illegal immigrants; $3 million of that $4 million comes from the American Rescue Plan.
States and municipalities need to disincentivize illegal immigration, not encourage it. Boston was already one of eight sanctuary cities and home to many ultra-woke colleges.
Remember, under President Joe Biden, inflation peaked at over 9% in 2022, and real wages are down since his presidency began.
The president’s big government spending agenda and the loose monetary policy from the Federal Reserve caused that inflation. In February 2021, Biden signed the wasteful $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law. The bill may have raised inflation by as many as 3 points, a March 2022 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found.
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The American Rescue Plan featured wasteful provisions including giving $350 billion to state, municipal, and tribal governments, many of which already had massive surpluses.
Since communities didn’t need the money, they found absurdly wasteful ways to burn it while people saw their paychecks shrink and struggled to pay bills. You can thank Democrats for this mess.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
