BIG-GOVERNMENT CONTAGION

The online edition of Kim Strassel’s weekly Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch column “Big-government contagion” is accompanied by a video that gives us the gist, but it omits lot of the painful details. Details such as these:

Democrats used the bill to tighten every fiber of the social safety net. Put aside the $260 billion for unemployment benefits, potentially necessary in light of record jobless claims. The bill throws $25 billion more at food stamps and child nutrition; $12 billion at housing; $3.5 billion to states for child care; $32 billion at education; $900 million at low-income heating assistance; $50 million at legal services for the poor and so on. This is a massive expansion of the welfare state, seemingly with no regard to the actual length of this crisis.

There’s also the money appropriators threw at government for no purpose other than the throwing. Every outpost gets dollars, most for nothing more than the general command “to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” NASA gets $60 million. Has the virus infected the sun’s corona? The National Archives gets $8 million. Will it put the virus on display? Many departments get cash for research, regardless of their relevance to today’s medical crisis. Perhaps the Energy Department will use its additional $99 million in “science” to gauge how the virus responds in a nuclear reactor.

Then there’s the outright pork. The Forest Service gets $3 million for “forest and rangeland research,” $27 million for “capital improvement and maintenance,” and $7 million for wildfire management. The bill shovels $75 million to the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, $25 million to the Kennedy Center, an odd $78,000 “payment” to the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development. A water project in central Utah gets $500,000. Appropriators can sneak a lot into 880 pages.

The bill throws $25 billion more at food stamps and child nutrition; $12 billion at housing; $3.5 billion to states for child care; $32 billion at education; $900 million at low-income heating assistance; $50 million at legal services for the poor and so on. This is a massive expansion of the welfare state, seemingly with no regard to the actual length of this crisis.“

I tallied those numbers up and they’re about as much as what we spend every year on the endless war in Afghanistan.

I used to get upset at domestic welfare spending, but when I never heard most of my fellow conservatives objecting to the spending on Middle East wars and nation building, I realized that much fiscal “conservatism” was a fraud. I figured if we can afford to spend unlimited money overseas invasions and occupations - and even health and welfare in the occupied countries like Iraq - maybe it’s not so wrong to spend money for low income people right here at home. There are a lot of struggling American families with kids. I’m not going to begrudge them food stamps

Government Gangsters. It’s Paradise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcsvE1zv1ek

And they have the audacity to pit us against each other, keep us tax/debt slaved and war/death played.

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