ALERT: The Biden administration and its allies are fibbing about the $1.9 trillion “stimulus” bill. They claim that if we don’t spend exorbitant amounts of money, our country is doomed.
What’s their justification? According to the liberal narrative, Obama and Biden’s 2009 stimulus package failed to revitalize the economy because it was too small. Therefore, the next coronavirus relief bill must be more than twice the size.
What’s the real story? The economy was in a terrible place when Obama passed his $787 billion stimulus in 2009. The current economic situation is altogether different.
In the past few months, our economy has taken a turn toward recovery and is expected to continue gaining strength throughout 2021. Let’s look at a few comparisons.
- Roughly 10% of Americans were unemployed in 2009 compared to today’s 6.3%.
- It took the Obama economy a sluggish five years to decrease unemployment from roughly 10% to 6.3%. It took our pandemic-shattered economy only 9 months to drop from 14.8% to 6.3%.
- During Obama’s recovery from 2009-2017, the economy grew an average of 2.2% each year. In the first quarter of this year alone, our GDP is expected to grow by as much as 9.5%.
Instead of offering targeted help to people who need it most, Democrats are using trillions of taxpayer dollars to make our economic problems worse. Their bill promises $1,400 checks to the vast majority of Americans, whether they lost their jobs or need the money. It includes $400 billion in blue-state bailouts and a massive minimum wage hike that could kill 3.7 million jobs. And it more than doubles what the average unemployed worker receives each week. With this bump in benefits, more than half of workers will make more money not working than working. Our economy is growing. Giving people more excuses to sit on the sidelines and not work makes no sense.
Even former Obama officials are raising concerns about the price tag and economic pitfalls of Biden’s monstrous package.
It’s time to face reality. Biden’s bill alone could cost each household nearly $16,000, and it only scratches the surface of the Democrats’ spending agenda (remember Biden’s $2 trillion green energy plan?). We’ve already spent $3.5 trillion on the pandemic, and our national debt looms at nearly $28 trillion (yikes!). The Congressional Budget Office expects the debt to grow larger than the entire U.S. economy this year.
Our take: Careless federal spending is a recipe for economic destruction, not relief. Instead of focusing on where money might be needed, such as vaccination efforts and small business support, the Democrats are using this package as part of their push to spend as much as possible on as many things as possible—all while the national debt balloons to historic proportions.
→ Read more: Biden’s endless winter (Wall Street Journal)
→ Read more: Battle over $1.9 trillion covid relief package is as much about political optics as economic necessity (Washington Post)
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