Between April 2020 and September 2021, Congress will have sent a typical American family of four at least $26,600 and possibly up to $109,048 in cash “COVID relief,” according to a new House GOP analysis. The analysis concludes the following:
— The average family of four with both parents out of work will receive $109,048 or more in government COVID stimulus checks, child tax subsidies, and unemployment checks through September of this year.
— The same family with one parent unemployed will receive $67,824.
— Even a family of four making twice the national median income with NO LOSS of INCOME during COVID received $26,600 from the government.
NOTE: Actual cash payments may be considerably higher. This analysis excludes rental assistance, paychecks funded by PPP, expanded ACA/Cobra health subsidies, student assistance, and other COVID cash assistance.
The total varies by whether government lockdowns knocked one or both parents in a family out of a job. But even a family with full continued employment in the past year with two kids younger than age 6 will have gotten nearly $27,000 in money Congress will have to ultimately take from their kids because it funded none of its COVID extravagance. That’s half the median U.S. household income, amounting to an extraordinary income infusion.
Here’s a chart displaying the numbers for an American family of four with an income of less than $125,000 and two children younger than age 6 (the federal child tax credit is slightly less for children older than 6). Four in five American families earn $125,000 or less each year and average two children each, meaning the numbers in this chart apply to the majority of American families.
This family also uses the federal tax credit that pays for placing children in nonparent care (the yellow area). In one of the three “stimulus” bills factored into these calculations, ARPA, that childcare credit was made refundable and the total reimbursed doubled, resulting in essentially a federal payment to those who spend a lot on nonparent childcare. This expansion was technically temporary, but like many of the welfare outlays “temporarily enacted because COVID,” the Biden administration wants to make it permanent.
So some Republicans have finally switched from helping pass trillions in COVID-labeled deficit spending to now pretending to care about the foreseeably horrific results, conveniently after it was possible to stop this from happening. It appears politicians learned from public rage at the 2008-09 bailouts to throw Americans a bone while using the excuse of a “crisis” to again funnel their special interests massive infusions of taxpayer cash.
While Americans were getting eye-watering levels of bribes with their own children’s money to stay silent about the evils of lockdowns, businesses and bureaucrats were raiding the next several generations’ worth of federal tax receipts. In the CARES Act, the first of three COVID “stimulus” bills measured in the analysis above, each American was handed $1,200 while businesses were handed the equivalent of $13,000 per American.
Above and beyond all the money sent from future taxpayers to big businesses were insane infusions of cash for the federal bureaucracy, amounting to multiple times some entities’ normal annual appropriations. In the Consolidated Appropriations Act, or the second round of stimulus checks measured in the analysis, Americans got $600 each — which Senate Republicans memorably refused to bump to $2,000 each, possibly costing their Senate majority — while nearly every government entity in the nation got billions in funding increases even though many shut down services.
In the third “stimulus” bill included in the above analysis, Democrats larded on hundreds of billions of dollars for every government entity known to man at a cost of $15,000 per American household, while sending $1,400 checks to each eligible American. Only 5 percent of that “COVID spending bill” was actually related to COVID. State and local governments got $1,000 for every American in that bill despite, again, largely shutting down and offering few services in the last year.
The federal debt is now at $230,000 per American man, woman, and child. That figure doesn’t include the unfathomably higher levels of unfunded liabilities, meaning the spending that Washington currently promises to expend through welfare programs like Social Security and Medicaid. Those decades of social welfare overspending alone had put our nation on the path to bankruptcy well before COVID gave our nation’s “leaders” an excuse to make everything worse in almost every way possible.
While lockdowns put Americans out of work and decimated Main Street, politicians forestalled public backlash by delaying and thus inflating the pain. Their bribes push Americans into complicity, psychologically binding us to their cowardly choices and thus helping shield them from the consequences of betraying their own nation in a time of great need.
They bought public acquiescence to their theft of our liberties and national future by starving Americans and then expecting us to be grateful they’re tossing us some rich tidbits of our own children’s inheritance to gorge ourselves on together.
Source: The Federalist
