A REAL KICK IN THE SHINS
The Dems’ unjustified $1.9 trillion stimulus bill will hurt the US economy — not help it
CONGRESS and the president are on the verge of enacting a third “stimulus” bill, costing taxpayers $1.9 trillion. The “American Rescue Plan” comes on the heels of a second “stimulus” passed in December, which cost about $1 trillion, and the first one in March that amounted to $2.2 trillion. But this latest enormous bill is about helping politicians, not about helping the country.
The bill’s first offense is that it will not stimulate the economy in a meaningful way — and will even negatively impact workers’ wages in the long run. Second, it does not qualify as aid because it plunges the US deeper in debt to provide checks to households with six-figure incomes. Third, the bill is a wet kiss to the Democratic Party and their special interest patrons. Americans will be hard-pressed to find a bigger bill with fewer redeeming qualities in recent history.
The packaging of it as a “stimulus” is the weakest rationale for the bill — which is no small feat. Keynesian economists argue for increased government purchases and transfers during economic downturns brought on by a fall in “aggregate demand”: spending. But the COVID-related downturn is not caused by a typical fall in spending that can be relieved by lots of transfers. It’s caused by a pandemic that prohibits people from working and spending on large swaths of the economy.
Leading left-of-center economists like former Clinton and Obama official Larry Summers understand this and have criticized the bill. The roughly $900 billion for transfer payments will not be forcefully spent, because people are not yet willing or permitted to spend a significant fraction of their income on travel and leisure. That’s one reason the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the fiscal multiplier — that is, the economic “bang for the buck” — for this proposal is very low. If the bill were meant to be stimulative amidst COVID, there should be a lot more infrastructure spending to generate economic growth.
Putting as many people back to work as possible is key to recovery, alleviating poverty and increasing longterm wages. Fortunately, the unemployment rate has already halved from its peak. But, as economist Kyle Pomerleau has pointed out, the bill will reduce work by imposing marginal tax rates over 100 percent on many workers. In other words, for every additional dollar of wages that a worker earns, he or she is at risk of losing more than a dollar in taxes and government payments.
According to economist Casey Mulligan, the full package of transfer payments in the bill would eclipse the incomes of 85 percent of Americans. Households with unemployed adults could take in more in state and federal benefits under this bill than they would take home on a market income above $100,000.
That will put many people in a very difficult situation when they have to decide whether it’s a good idea to return to available work and stunt the economic recovery for everyone.
The enormous increase in debt will also crowd out valuable economic investments. Capital that should go to investing in factories, equipment and technology that would raise worker productivity will instead go to buy government debt. That’s why the Penn Wharton model projects the proposal will reduce worker wages for years into the future.
Nor is this bill a relief bill. If it were, they wouldn’t be sending $2,800 to childless households with $150,000 in income. Already, the average American’s income reached a record high in 2020 due to two COVID bills and a resilient economy. Personal income is now 13 percent higher than a year ago. Despite that, Americans spent 3 percent less in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to a year prior. Yet, the largest portion of the bill is mortgaging their future in order to cut checks for upper-middle-income people.
At the same time, several million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed due to the pandemic and public health restrictions. They need our help. The bill should focus aid on topping off, extending or improving the benefits created in the first two relief bills on the workers and small businesses most adversely affected. Yet less than a fifth of the bill could be considered highly meanstested and targeted at those worst affected.
To add insult to injury, the extreme and excessive borrowing will destroy future jobs and wages. Some relief.
The two groups the bill clearly benefits are Democrat-controlled state governments and their chief benefactor, government employee unions. The second-costliest section of the bill is transfers to state and local governments amounting to $350 billion, or 116 times more than the entire revenue shortfall for all state governments. Due to the increases in personal income, state revenues barely changed in 2020, falling less than 0.2 percent. Spendthrift Democrats on the state level are being given license to indulge.
State aid is allocated disproportionately to states with higher unemployment rates, which would seem reasonable if job loss was random across the country. In fact, blue states are experiencing much higher unemployment because of policy decisions they’ve actively chosen. Each of the 10 states with the highest unemployment have unitary Democrat state governments.
The bill allocates an additional $130 billion for spending on K-12 schools, presumably mostly for COVID mitigation and reopening. However, those schools still haven’t spent more than $10 billion of $63 billion allocated for school reopening going back to the CARES Act in March. And if you needed more evidence this provision is a sleight of hand, half of it will not be spent until 2024 to 2028.
The American Rescue Plan makes Washington Democrats look busy while satisfying profligate state politicians and their special interests. The middle class in America will be left holding the bag. The bill is $1.9 trillion of new debt with practically zero justification that will make American workers poorer for decades to come. Hopefully, the president or Congress will stop it before they make a historic mistake.
IKNEW going on vacation during a pandemic wasn’t the smartest thing to do. I risked coming into close contact with strangers on TSA lines and baggage carousels. I understood Florida restaurants could be overcrowded and under-regulated, the golf courses lawless, the pools too populated, the casinos virtual coronavirus petri dishes.
What I didn’t realize was how a greedy airline would exponentially increase my risk of dying from COVID-19, with the full blessing of my government.
I had originally booked a vacation to a Caribbean beach and golf resort. The Bahamian government seemed to be effectively mitigating risk by having all travelers produce a negative COVID test result before flying there, and get tested again upon arrival at the resort. But the CDC still listed the country as a Level 3 risk — nonessential travel not recommended — so I canceled.
There was always Florida, just left of the Bahamas and with fewer conch fritters.
The CDC and FAA had little to say about air travel to the Sunshine State; no negative test results or even temperature-taking were required. Just sign an easy form on your phone saying you don’t have symptoms, promise to social distance and to quarantine once you’re back, yadda yadda. The complete lack of urgency was almost comforting.
But clues that the skies would not be so friendly began arriving in text messages from the airline saying it expected a “fuller flight” and that I could change to “other flight options” at no extra charge.
The airline text didn’t actually point to, or give data on, these lesscrowded flights. And I would have to cancel my weekend flights to presumably book a midweek nighttime route. I’m sure people back at the hedge fund wouldn’t mind me taking a few extra days with no notice. If I worked at a hedge fund.
So onward I marched through Newark-Liberty’s Terminal C.
The waiting area was my first warning to turn back. No chairs were roped off for social distancing and my friend was immediately asked by an older woman if she could sit next to him. Nice that she was polite, but couldn’t Typhoid Mary see the row of empty seats across the way?
Common sense eroded further once we boarded the Embraer aircraft, with its 24 rows of four seats, two on each side of a center aisle. Every seat was filled. Apparently, six feet of social distancing is a foreign concept in the deadly skies. You had people sitting, at most, two feet in front of you, two feet in back of you and one person inches to the side of you. You would have had more room on a rush-hour rickshaw in downtown Mumbai.
In New York City right now, you can’t stand at a bar, and restaurants must operate at only 35 percent of capacity. Madison Square Garden, with its 150-foot-high rafters, can fill only 10 percent of its seats — and every fan must have proof of a negative COVID test. Even cavernous outdoor stadiums are being held to a 10percent (or less) limit right now.
But in this flying aluminum beer can, where non-screened passengers would be breathing the same communal air for three hours, seemingly not a thought was given to cutting capacity. With a plane half full, they could have alternated rows of empty seats and doubled the space between passengers.
Maybe I’ve been living in Cuomoland too long, but I was stunned to learn the government allows this. It’s every airline for themselves. A few have limited capacity. But many, like United, fully book flights. I understand the airlines are bleeding money and need customers. I also know they are about to get another $14 billion in taxpayer cash in the latest COVID bill, their third bailout in a year. They can afford to fly with fewer fannies in the seats for a little while longer.
United says blocking off seats is only a “public relations strategy — not a safety strategy,” and it is instead focused on enforcing maskwearing and disinfecting planes with “hospital-grade” cleaners.
That didn’t improve passengers’ peace of mind. We sat in our casketlike seats, afraid to move about the cabin, scared to cough, terrified to hear a sneeze, and eyeing each other suspiciously. Is that girl’s mask slipping under her nostrils? The guy with the goatee doesn’t seem to have a proper seal. You could practically hear the Xanax bottles popping.
The good news is that most commercial jets have pretty good air filtering and circulation systems. Powerful fans and high-efficiency particulate absorbing (HEPA) filters “are 99.9 percent effective” in removing particulate contaminants such as COVID-19, experts say.
The bad news: That filter won’t do much when Mike from Massapequa sneezes, his sagging Metallica mask failing to catch all of the 30,000 droplets — potentially carrying 200 million virus particles, traveling at 200 mph — from his nose to your neck.
DR. Seuss is down for the count — Dr. Seuss Enterprises is now in command. After a long, if relatively low-key, jihad against the children’s author by left-wing academics and activists, Dr. Seuss Enterprises has announced that it will deep-six a halfdozen of the author’s books, including “And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” the first children’s work Theodor Geisel published under the name of his beloved alter-ego.
“Dr. Seuss Enterprises” is a comical name — appending the self-aggrandizing business-school dropout “Enterprises” to the lighthearted “Dr. Seuss,” you might as well call it the Magical Childhood Whimsy Corporation of Zhengzhou — and its craven self-censorship renders it more comical still: a veritably Seussian cartoon caricature of corporate cowardice. This is what happens when you give a little bit of power to the weasels down in marketing and human resources.
The complaints about Seuss’ books are not without foundation. “And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street” contains both language (“Chinaman”) and imagery (slant-eyed figure in a conical hat) that are, for good reason, considered offensive. The other Seuss books on the blacklist have similar language and images.
As it turns out, a man born in 1904 and writing during the Roosevelt administration did not have a racial sensibility or a conception of etiquette identical with our own today. This should come as a surprise to no literate adult, and we do not do anybody — least or all children — any favors by conspiring to keep them ignorant of such facts.
The idea that children are harmed by mere exposure to words and images — rather than educated by such exposure — is pure superstition, but regnant superstition. Hence, even self-consciously anti-racist works such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” have been suppressed by school boards and libraries for the crime of accurately portraying the world they were written about. “Of Mice and Men” has come under similar pressure, as have dozens of other works by authors from Shakespeare to Maya Angelou.
And this is not only about verboten words and images: Part of the complaint against “Mulberry Street” was its “centering white childhood,” a social-justice no-no. As quoted in the Los Angeles Times, a parent looking to spare their children the indignity of reading “Huckleberry Finn” — arguably the greatest American novel — complained about its storytelling: “There’s no counter-narrative to this black person dealing with racism and a white person saving them.” This is not about George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television — this is about the elimination of ideas and points of view, narratives, and entire bodies of literature.
Americans have always been keen to ban our best books: Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; “The Great Gatsby” has been shelved because of its references to drug use. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was challenged when it was published in 1962 and remains targeted today by the little suppressors, who object to a white man having created a troubling Native American character. Some dolts down in Alabama banned “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” because they felt it was unkind to white people, and others have gone after the book for its sexual explicitness.
How these decisions get made is anybody’s guess — Hachette dumped Woody Allen but published a new edition of “Mein Kampf ” in 2017. Mark Halperin’s alleged sexual harassment was too much for Penguin Books, which published the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” under its Penguin Classics imprint in 2016.
Children’s literature has always addressed serious and sometimes troubling themes, from Little Red Riding Hood to “Watership Down.” Dr. Seuss himself created one of the great satires of discrimination with his Star-Belly Sneetches (self-satisfied bigots who lord it over their plain-bellied brethren). Suppressing that which is troubling in children’s literature in order to relieve uneasiness in neurotic adults is an act of intellectual and cultural violence. It proudly salutes the flag of ignorance.
It would be better to publish 1,000 genuinely wicked books out of principle than to suppress one problematic one out of cowardice. But these are cowardly times, with the Seuss people virtually burning their own books even as Amazon disappears controversial political books such as Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” and documentaries such as “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”
Where does it stop? If anybody ever gets around to rereading T. S. Eliot’s poems, which are interlaced with genuinely nasty anti-Semitism, his heirs will have nothing to live on except royalties from “Cats.”
The Left does not have a philosophy — what it has is an enemies list. And it should tell us something that its enemies include Dr. Seuss.