And it continues
What Americans get for the money
“If states had rising revenues and have already had reimbursement for their covid expenses, I don’t see why we should be borrowing money from China to send them more money.”
—Mitt Romney
WILL those in favor of the new blowout spending bill now label Mitt Romney as too rightwing a character to be taken seriously?
The new covid/stimulus/infrastructure/mental health/AmeriCorps/unemployment/nursing/state recovery/ Seaway International Bridge/child care/ nutrition/arts/humanities/ socially disadvantaged farmers/Native American language protection . . . .
Let’s start over. The new so-called “covid/stimulus” spending bill gains more critics the more folks read it. It’s as if Americans aren’t willing for their representatives to pass bills so that we can all see what’s in them. (Note to Nancy Pelosi.)
As the papers flesh out the details, you might have noticed: The Biden administration “compromised” with more conservative Democrats to reduce the number of people getting stimulus checks. The wires say that about 17 million fewer affluent adults and their children will receive this round of direct payments. But about 280 million Americans in total—200 million adults and 80 million children—are still eligible. That’s almost 160 million households.
NB: 280 million people in a country of 330 million. Politically, it’s a good deal. Everybody loves Santa. But fiscally this is lunacy. Our country is going to have to borrow this money. A lot of money. Trillions.
We wonder how many Americans can even fathom $1.9 trillion. About 2 trillion seconds ago, the world was going through the Middle Paleolithic Period, also known as the Stone Age. Neanderthals are back in the news today—but they were walking around 2 trillion seconds ago. And other modern humans were walking across the Bering land bridge to populate this hemisphere. A trillion is a lot.
Any hour now, the United States national debt will pass $28 trillion. The new bill will put it above $30 trillion soon enough. And the government will have to print more money, or send it electronically.
The law of supply and demand is a law because it always works. To flood the world with printed dollars will one day make them worth less. Already stories about the fear of inflation have begun to appear in the business papers. When inflation kicks in, and it will, all those 401(k)s will become less of a retirement security.
But enough about us.
Is this fair to our children and grandchildren? They’ll be burdened with this debt for years, maybe generations. Our parents and grandparents didn’t leave us this kind of legacy. But we sure are piling it on those to come after us.
If the world loses confidence in the U.S. dollar someday, and Americans have to pay significantly higher interest rates to compensate for the runaway debt, and inflation eats at our retirement savings, and perhaps the government will have to take care of more of us in old age, and pile up more debt to do it, etc., historians will look back on this as the point when the country’s finances went off the rails.