President Biden has not backed down from his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending proposal, and House Democrats are pushing full steam ahead on making his vision a legislative reality. But a top budget watchdog just warned that the budget-busting legislation, which costs roughly $13,260 per federal taxpayer, is full of spending that has nothing to do with the pandemic.
Article by Brad Polumbo from FEE.
“Only about 1 percent of the entire package goes toward COVID vaccines, and 5 percent is truly focused on public health needs surrounding the pandemic,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) warned on Wednesday.
“Meanwhile, nearly half of the package will be spent on poorly targeted rebate checks and state and local government aid, including to households and governments that have experienced little or no financial loss during this crisis,” the report continues.
Even some of the money that is ostensibly related to COVID-19, like billions intended to help schools reopen, is highly misleading. For example, as CRFB senior policy director Marc Goldwein notes, much of this money for “school reopening” is actually allocated for 2023 and 2024, long past when all schools will have reopened.
More broadly, the committee reports that at least $300 billion of the bill’s spending, 15 percent, is allocated toward long-standing policy priorities that have no direct relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The bill includes a number of other long-standing priorities, such as expanding the child tax credit and earned income tax credit, increasing Affordable Care Act subsidies, and boosting the minimum wage,” CRFB president Maya MacGuineas says. “These policies don’t belong in a COVID relief package, and should be fully offset if retained.”
That Congress would co-opt the COVID-19 crisis to push partisan priorities and hand out wasteful slush-funds will understandably appall many Americans. But it shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Washington’s propensity for waste, cronyism, and profligacy is no secret at this point.
Senator Rand Paul’s annual “Waste Report” documents examples of profligate government waste every year. Of the countless billions in total waste documented by the senator’s office, memorable examples include subsidizing frog mating, taxpayer support for the Pakistani film industry, studying nicotine-addicted fish, funding for Sri Lankan think tanks, and taxpayer money spent to combat truancy… in the Philippines.
Waste is a feature, not a bug, of how Congress routinely handles our money. And it’s also, sadly, par for the course that legislators slip unrelated provisions into bills seen as “must-pass” to quietly force through changes they know would never become law as stand-alone legislation.
For example, Congress passed a massive “omnibus” spending bill paired with COVID-19 relief legislation in December. The legislation was 5,500+ pages long and given to most members of Congress hours before the vote was scheduled. It was full of bizarre expenditures—like more than $40 million for the Kennedy Center and seemingly random foreign aid funding.
In reality, none of it is random. The money for “school reopening” long after schools are reopened is really a generic handout for teachers’ unions—which donate heavily to many members of Congress—masquerading as emergency COVID relief. Similarly, each odd pet project or earmark can usually be tracked to a particular interest group or individual with sway over a given politician. This is, unfortunately, simply the status quo of how the federal government operates.
So, it’s utterly unsurprising that policymakers are taking this same pork-filled approach with the latest legislation. But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s warning suggests it could be even worse this time than in past bills.
We already knew that Biden’s budget-busting COVID-19 “stimulus” proposal wasn’t actually going to stimulate the economy and itself contains job-killing provisions. Now we know that much of it isn’t even related to COVID-19 at all.
COVID-19 lockdowns are taking down an independent news outlet
Nobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.
Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it.
When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that.
Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the resurgence of lockdowns that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance.
The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $17,300 to stay afloat through March when we hope the economy will be more open, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated.
The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. In November, 2020, we hit 1.2 million visitors.
We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above.
As the world spirals towards radical progressivism, the need for truthful journalism has never been greater. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going.
Bitcoin: 32SeW2Ajn86g4dATWtWreABhEkiqxsKUGn
