Free Republic

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” That saying holds true more now than ever. But in the rush to “do something,” what the government does – in response to the global pandemic – actually matters. In the last few months, Washington has spent at least $5 trillion trying to mitigate the economic damage done by lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. And that’s not counting the cash the Federal Reserve is setting on fire daily. It’s easy to sneak favors into massive omnibus spending bills, so it’s Christmas in spring right now. The Kennedy Center gets a truckload of...

Blue States Will see economic ruin in Cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, these cities may start to look like Caracas, Venezuela in the weeks ahead. America is starting to reopen for business across the country — except for a handful of states where lockdown orders are expected to remain in place for weeks to come. With very few exceptions, the cities and states that have ordered their businesses to remain comatose and their millions of workers to go without paychecks are blue, blue, blue. This list includes New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, and Oregon....

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) says "the federal government has an ethical obligation to bail out my state. Admittedly, we might have been excessively generous in how we spent taxpayers' money. Perhaps this was a mistake. However, there is no need to make the people of California suffer for the miscues of their government. The federal government has an unconstrained power to create money. Failure to use this power to rescue California from bankruptcy would be a crime against humanity." Among the "miscues" are $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities, 15,000 hotel rooms leased to house the homeless along with...

After fully privatizing Deutsche Lufthansa AG a quarter-century ago, the German government will become a minority owner in an effort to rescue the country’s largest airline from economic devastation wrought by coronavirus travel restrictions. The airline group, which includes Lufthansa Airlines, SWISS International Air Lines and Austrian Airlines, agreed Monday to a 9 billion euro ($9.8 billion) bailout package in which the federal government will receive a 20% stake in the company in return for two board seats and veto power over any hostile takeover bid. Lufthansa agreed to limit dividends and management pay. The government will also give Lufthansa...

California Governor Gavin Newsom weighed in on the question of bailing out states whose budgets have been blown up by the coronavirus pandemic. Newsom told CNN’s “State of the Union” that a state bailout was not “charity” and that Congress has a “moral and ethical obligation” to help Americans across the country. The House passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill last week which contained almost a trillion dollars to bail out states. It also contained goodies for all — another stimulus check, help for renters, college debt relief, and cash for illegal immigrants. Fox News: “Not to act now...

Congress is considering a $3 trillion stimulus package. HERE is an infographic of how the first $2.3 trillion was distributed. See Infographic...

Americans had a collective fit when they learned about Nancy Pelosi’s insane new “relief” bill. The massive spending package would cost us $3 trillion dollars. All of it would go to Democrat “wish lists.” Immediately, the White House promised they would never sign such a bill. Now, Pelosi is backtracking. You have to give it to Nancy Pelosi. The old gal doesn’t give two rats asses about America. When Congress was trying to pass funding to save small businesses, she held it up… twice. Then, she closed the House, preventing lawmakers from continuing to provide solutions during the crisis. Meanwhile,...

The House of Representatives on Friday evening passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, the most expensive legislation approved by that body in history, that Democrats hailed as the unprecedented response needed to deal with the pandemic and its economic fallout. The record-breaking bill narrowly passed by a 208-199 vote. Fourteen Democrats defied their party and voted "no," while one Republican, Rep. Pete King of New York, broke with the GOP and voted “yes.” “I’m thrilled," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after the bill's passage. "I'm so proud of my members. They just did something so monumental for the American...

By their own standards, the House Democrats’ Round 4 “rescue package” is a flop. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set herself up to fail by instructing her caucus and surrogates to insist that Congress prioritize testing, testing, and more testing in future rounds of coronavirus response funding. At the end of the day, Democrats scrounged up a budget for those tests amounting to less than 1 percent of the $3 trillion package Pelosi introduced this week. Instead of putting their money where their mouth is, they slapped together a leftist wish list dedicated to causes unrelated to the pandemic. It is...

"Pelosi's making us come back to vote on a pretend bill that's dead on arrival in the Senate...I think we should attack the virus, not the taxpayer." Click excerpt link for Video!

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's new $3 trillion coronavirus spending proposal is politically motivated "garbage" that "doesn't pass the laugh test," Sen. Bill Cassidy argued Wednesday. Appearing on "America's Newsroom" with host Ed Henry, Cassidy, R-La., said Pelosi tried to get away with more liberal additions to the bill once again, but this time it's hidden in the fine print. "Clearly she went to her committee chairs and she said give me that which you think maybe we can get in here – a starting point for negotiations so we’ll look reasonable when we retreat from it," he explained. "On...

• There is so much good (and also bad) analytical work appearing every day that calls into question the conventional wisdom about both COVID-19 and the hard lockdown remedy that just about every country has adopted. There’s so much that I can’t keep up, and can’t decide from day to day which items to pass along to Power Line readers. Fortunately for us, the British journalist Toby Young has put together a pretty good one-stop-shopping site called Lockdown Sceptics. Worth a look each day. Other good recent reads on lockdown skepticism include Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic (“Take the Shutdown...

National bus companies are headed to Washington D.C for a silent protest to ask lawmakers for aide as the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down a majority of their business. The pandemic has taken a toll on all travel and transportation companies, including a local charter service. Tuscaloosa Charter Service Manager Alicia Adams said the government has given $75 billion in aide to Amtrak and airline companies. National bus companies are asking for $15 billion to help survive their shutdown. Adams said they haven’t had any trips scheduled since March 15 and have none booked for summer. “When the University of...

Five Western states including California have called on the federal government for about $1 trillion in aid to states, said Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday.

Harvard decided not to apply for their $9 million share of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act - the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, after President Donald Trump brought the issue into the national limelight. Princeton followed suit. The other Ivies are still deciding whether to accept up to $62.9 million in CARES money — despite their collective endowment of $140 billion. However, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com discovered that these funds are just the tip of the iceberg. We scoured the backend of the U.S. Department of Education website and found the full database: 5,137 colleges and universities that...

If a reputable polling outfit were to ask Americans what caused the current financial crisis on Wall Street, they would say the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. If Americans were asked in the same poll when the financial crisis on Wall Street started, they would tie it to outbreaks of the virus in the U.S. this year. But as the timeline below and the chart above clearly substantiate, the financial crisis on Wall Street began in earnest on September 17, 2019, almost four months before the first death from coronavirus anywhere in the world was reported in China on January 11, 2020...

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch requested a temporary restraining order against California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and his Director of the California Department of Social Services Kim Johnson to prevent them from giving nearly $80 million of taxpayers’ money in cash payments and benefits to illegal aliens amid the Coronavirus pandemic. The court found that Newsom likely had no authority to give illegal aliens taxpayer money but that ‘there was a public interest in sending tax money to illegal aliens during the Coronavirus crisis.’ – Judicial Watch reported. “It is astonishing that a court would allow a public official to...

New Jersey is facing a financial disaster due to loss in revenue and spike in expenses related to the coronavirus outbreak that could be just weeks away, Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday. “Right now, it’s pouring,” Murphy said, shortly after announcing he was ordering all public and private schools closed for the rest of the academic year. “We are on the brink of having to make very tough and, quite frankly, very unpalatable decisions." Murphy has previously warned of “historic” public worker layoffs without federal assistance. Murphy rescinded an executive order Monday from last year tasking the state treasurer to...

The Federal Reserve made some changes to its Main Street Lending Program according to a Thursday press release by the central bank that will now extend a much-needed lifeline to the U.S. oil industry. As bankruptcies, capex cuts, and unfavorable financial reports from Q1 start to trickle into the US shale patch, more oil companies in peril will now be able to tap the Main Street fund that was set up to render aid to small and medium sized businesses. Prior to today, those funds were not available to companies who had more than 10,000 employees and $2.5 billion in...

Community Health Systems, HCA Healthcare and Universal Health Services received a total of more than $1 billion from the $100 billion emergency relief fund for healthcare providers created under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. The three for-profit hospital operators disclosed the grants during their first quarter earnings calls. Each company also received advance Medicare payments to help offset the financial impact of COVID-19. The advance payments are loans that must be repaid, while the grants do not require repayment. Here is a breakdown of the grants and advance payments each company had received at the time of...