Sensing that Republicans aren’t eager to help Democrats in their never-ending quest to get everyone hooked on welfare, President Biden and administration officials are dialing up the hysterics over passing trillions more in COVID-19 “stimulus” money.
Centrist Republicans in the Senate came to Biden with a perfectly reasonable $600 billion proposal that would cover the most urgent needs: additional weekly unemployment money for the millions of people who have lost their jobs and loans for small businesses continuing to struggle.
That offer also came after the federal government had already passed $4 trillion in relief money over the past year.
But no, Biden wants another $2 trillion. On Friday, he, in bad faith, accused Republicans of having proposed “either to do nothing or not enough.” He said that Republicans, “all of a sudden, many of them have rediscovered fiscal restraint and concern for the deficits.”
Contrary to widespread belief on the Right, Biden isn’t that dumb. He knows that Republicans aren’t opposing his $2 trillion plan for opposition’s sake. Their entirely legitimate concern is that we’re dumping yet more money on a problem that Democratic mayors, governors, and teachers unions are sustaining.
So long as our biggest cities continue with severe economic restrictions on businesses and so long as public schools remain closed, all of the “stimulus” money in the world will make no difference.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday said that a big bill like Biden’s was necessary because, “We already have way too many small businesses that are closing” and that “we need to provide help to get them to the other side.”
True, small businesses are going under by the thousands, but it’s not a mystery as to why. They’ve either been legally forced to close entirely or to put in place so many health measures, reduced capacity, no indoor dining, mandatory mask-wearing between bites of food, that there’s no joy in even bothering to patronize them. Who wants to eat outside in New York in the middle of January? Who wants to go to a bar where they’re told to wear a mask between sips? (And the server had better not catch you wandering over to chat with a nearby friend!)
The Democrats’ answer to those questions is, Why do you want more people to die?
No one likes to hear bad news, but we remain in a pandemic. People die, even if the median age of those people dying from COVID-19 matches life expectancy and even if the survival rate approaches 99%. The goal, then, is to protect the vulnerable and ensure the lives of the vast majority of us who are at minimal risk aren’t upended by throwing children out of school and shutting down businesses.
Democrats continue to lack any sense of urgency about that. They’re perfectly fine with keeping people locked up inside their homes and sending them a check.
This isn’t about fiscal restraint and concern for the deficits. It’s about blowing through money that will do nothing to fix an economy that’s been manually shut down.
