COVID BILL’S WASTEFUL SPENDING BY THE DEMOCRATS
Tuesday, April 5th, 2022
Eighteen Senate Republicans sold out to Senate Democrats, with 17 of them voting Wednesday night to advance a $1.2 trillion Democrat “infrastructure” bill and another signaling he would.
The Senate voted to invoke cloture, or advance, H.R. 3684, the legislative vehicle for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. The vote featured Republican and Democrat support for the bill. The Senate voted 67-32 to invoke cloture on the bill, with seventeen Republicans in favor of invoking cloture on the bill.
All of them voted for this procedural vote without reading the bill—because it would have been impossible for them to read a bill that does not yet exist. The bill has still not been written despite months of negotiations.
The Senate Republicans who voted for the Democrat $1.2 trillion bill include:
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) was absent but signaled that he would have voted yes to advance the legislation.
These Senate Republicans voted to advance the bill even though lawmakers have not yet drafted a physical bill.
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 01: U.S. President Joe Biden (Center R) and Vice President Kamala Harris … [+]
This week, the U.S. House passed, along party lines, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. A vote in the U.S. Senate is expected soon.
Buried within the 591-page bill is a $350 billion bailout for 50 states, tribal governments, U.S. territories, and more than 30,000 cities and counties.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com finally located the $350 billion allocation, line-by-line, in a supplemental database hidden on the back end of the House Oversight Committee’s website.
We mapped the data to each of the 50 states. Click here to see how much taxpayer money Congress earmarked your hometown to receive from the COVID “relief” bill.
Congress tried to hide these line-by-line appropriations, but thanks to technology and the internet, you can search it for yourself.
Sickening – and now they want to spend (Republicans: over 1 Trillion) and (Democrats over 3 Trillion!). Stop “helping” us and just let us go back to work 100%. If we keep this up, we will crash the Dollar, and all loose huge amounts of our savings and spending power – terrifying!!! Dee Sams
Subject:: MISSING: 96%!
Read it and weep!
www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/748/text
Text – H.R.748 – 116th Congress (2019-2020): CARES Act | Congress.gov – Congress.gov | Library of Congress
Text for H.R.748 – 116th Congress (2019-2020): CARES Act
MISSING: 96%!
Hard to believe, but look it up on Congress website for HR 748 from 116th Congress.
American population: 330,483,530
Stimulus bill: $2,000,000,000,000
Dividing the cost by every person in America is $6,051.74
The government could have given every person over $6,000, but instead will give $1,200 to each adult under a certain income.
Want to know where the missing 96% of your tax dollars went?
$300,000,000 for Migrant and Refugee Assistance pg 147 (a Democrat political plumb required for Pelosi to agree to support the bill)
$10,000 per person for student loan bailout (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$100,000,000 to NASA, because, who knows why
$20,000,000,000 to the USPS, because why the hell not
$300,000,000 to the Endowment for the Arts – because of it (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$300,000,000 for the Endowment for the Humanities/ because no one even knew that was a thing (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$15,000,000 for Veterans Employment Training
$435,000,000 for mental health support
$30,000,000,000 for the Department of Education stabilization fund/ because that will keep people employed (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$200,000,000 to Safe Schools Emergency Response to Violence Program (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$300,000,000 to Public Broadcasting / NPR has to be bought by the Dems (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$500,000,000 to Museums and Libraries / Who the hell knows how we are going to use it (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$720,000,000 to Social Security Admin / but get this only 200,000,000 is to help people. The rest is for admin costs
$25,000,000 for Cleaning supplies for the Capitol Building / it’s on page 136
$7,500,000 to the Smithsonian for additional salaries
$75,000,000 to the JFK Center for performing Arts – It then gave $25,000,000 to the DNC (Another Pelosi political plumb)
$25,000,000 for additional salary for House of Representatives – Democrats fought any increase in social security, but give themselves a nice fat raise (Another Pelosi political plumb)
To make sense of President Trump’s dust-up with Rep. Elijah Cummings, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Party, you have to go back to Baltimore in April 1968, when the city was overwhelmed by a riot in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The National Guard and city police proved unable to contain the situation. Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III, Mrs. Pelosi’s elder brother, pleaded with President Lyndon B. Johnson to send in federal troops.
In 1968 Maryland hadn’t yet been absorbed by the wealth of Washington. It was still a semi-Southern state, lying below the Mason-Dixon Line. Republican Spiro Agnew—later Richard Nixon’s vice president—had been elected governor in 1966 over a segregationist Democratic nominee. In the black areas of West and East Baltimore, the King assassination triggered four days of rioting and looting.
The conflict was so fierce that the Baltimore police, 500 state troopers and 6,000 National Guardsmen were unable to quell it. Finally the “insurrection” was halted when Johnson deployed nearly 5,000 Army troops at Agnew’s request. By the time it was over, six people were dead. Mr. D’Alesandro, who had considered running for governor, was so humiliated by the rioting in a city where his father has been mayor before him that he decided to withdraw from elective politics.
Earlier that year, the Johnson administration reluctantly released the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission. The report wasn’t to LBJ’s liking because it implied that his Great Society was an insignificant down payment on racial redress. The presidential panel—assembled to explain the 1967 race riots in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark, N.J.—should have been called the Lindsay Commission, after its vice chairman, New York Mayor John Lindsay. America’s racial problems, the report claimed, could be singularly attributed to white racism: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
Over time, the Kerner Commission’s view of racism became gospel in the media, academia and the Democratic Party. An intellectual Iron Curtain descended to protect black politicians—including ineffective ones like Mr. Cummings and even con men like the Rev. Al Sharpton—by denouncing their critics as racist.
Learning
through Pain
by Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University‘s Hoover Institution.
//PJ Media – December 10, 2013What will history make so far of our five-year voyage with Barack Obama? What will it make of hope and change — other than a sort of hysteria of 2008 that was a political version of the Pet Rock or the Cabbage Patch Doll derangement? Did we really experience faux-Greek columns and Latin mottoes (vero possumus) as Obama props to usher in the new order of the ages?What exactly made David Brooks focus on trouser creases, or Chris Matthews on involuntary leg tickles? How could any serious person believe a candidate who promised to change the very terrain of the planet? Why would sober critics declare a near rookie senator “a god”?Only as America slowly sobers up from five years of slumber can we begin to fathom Obama’s likely legacy — which is mostly wisdom acquired only from pain.Liberals always had thought a right-wing bully president would erode civil liberties. How ironic that a charismatic, post-racial, self-described “constitutional law professor” has done more damage to our Constitution than has any president since Richard Nixon. Had the AP, IRS, or NSA scandals occurred during the Bush second term, congressional Democrats would have been calling for impeachment.The old controversial presidential signing statements of the past are mere misdemeanors compared to Obama felonies of declaring settled law null and void, from the employer mandate to the implementation guidelines of Obamacare to exempting pet businesses and congressional staffs from the requirements of the law.A president can now decide not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or grant pre-election, de facto amnesties. Why, then, pass laws in the first place? The idea of political opponents being audited by the IRS or critical journalists having their phones monitored will be Obama’s Nixonian legacy. After Obama, one of two things will happen: either the presidency will be redefined as a sort of super-executive that can both make and enforce statutes, or a constitutional reaction will set in, and Obamism will be cited as a danger to the republic that we wish in the future never to repeat. (more…)
I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.
Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system’s free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.
The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed’s central motivation was to “affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative “credit easing.”
My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed’s trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.
This was a dream job, but I hesitated. And it wasn’t just nervousness about taking on such responsibility. I had left the Fed out of frustration, having witnessed the institution deferring more and more to Wall Street. Independence is at the heart of any central bank’s credibility, and I had come to believe that the Fed’s independence was eroding. Senior Fed officials, though, were publicly acknowledging mistakes and several of those officials emphasized to me how committed they were to a major Wall Street revamp. I could also see that they desperately needed reinforcements. I took a leap of faith.
In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.
It wasn’t long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash. (more…)
The sense is growing around Washington, and this increasingly includes Democrats, of living in an alternative universe. Barack Obama gives his State of the Union speech, the sequester looms, and the president flies around the country giving speeches. He’s had virtually no contact on the sequester with the legislative branch. Now he’s going to meet with them after the sequester happens. This is unusual. We need to look outside normal politics for explanations.
Mr. Obama likes to convey the impression that he doesn’t think or do business like other presidents. It’s time to take him at his word. If Washington is starting to look like an alternative universe, that’s because the president is creating an alternative universe, the Obamaian Universe. (Obamaian is pronounced Oh-buh-mayan, as in the recently famous calendar.)
The Obama administration is trying to pull us back into what astronomers would call the pre-Copernican world. Copernicus’ heliocentric system overthrew what was known as geocentrism—the belief that everything in the universe revolved around the earth. Beautiful maps exist depicting geocentrism.
Economic thinkers since at least the time of, well Copernicus, have understood that national well-being derived from private individuals going out into the private world to produce goods and trade goods, an activity that for centuries has created wealth for many nations. No longer. Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into separate parts. In the Obamaian universe, the units of the private economy—companies large or small—are satellites orbiting the great fixed planet of public spending. All material and economic life in the Obamaian model radiates outward from a central source of public spending. This is why spending in the Obama presidency abruptly jumped as high as 25% of GDP from a 40-year average of 20% of GDP. (more…)