Saturday, March 28, 2020

Foreboding About the Stimulus Bill

3/28/2020—Look, even I tweeted that the unanimous passage of the stimulus bill in the Senate was good news. I wrote in my column that the response to the virus shows that we can still work together in an emergency.

But I am still troubled. First, so much red ink. Of course you do that in an emergency. But we passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, when we run a $1 trillion dollar deficit every year.

Worse, no one even said anything about it.

The American people are being led by irresponsible people. We could at least have pledged to cut the yearly deficit when we have recovered from virus. We could at least have mentioned that this situation is why you don’t cut taxes during a boom—you will need the money later when there is an emergency.

National governments are not just like households, but they are not totally different either. If they were, we wouldn’t have taxes at all.

So, the unseriousness of the culture is allowed to grow.

The second part is the partisanship. How much of the unanimity comes because there is a Republican in the White House? Would Mitch McConnell have done this if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016?

You’d like to think so. But, deep down, I don’t believe it. And that means, ironically, that it is a good thing Trump won. Democrats would do this for the good of the country, while the Republican leaders would have put Party first.

After all, McConnell said you don’t allow a sitting President to put a Supreme Court Justice on the Court in his last year before an election, but recently said if there were a vacancy right now, he would fill it.

He is just a disreputable and dishonest person.

I hope I am wrong about this.

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