Free Republic

Former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers continues to blast the Biden administration’s stimulus plan and warns it will result in a major inflation crisis. “We’re taking substantial risks,” Summers told The Washington Post. “This might not have struck as much a nerve if it didn’t reflect concerns that were widely felt.” “I know the bathtub has been too empty,” he continued. “But one has to think about what the capacity of the bathtub is and how much water we’re trying to flow into it.”

Americans struggling to survive on federal benefits have waited weeks for word on their share of the $1.9 trillion stimulus. Some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens have been waiting weeks for the next round of promised financial aid from President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” coronavirus relief package, with no indication of when it would come. Chief among those are the millions of elderly Americans who depend on federal assistance to survive. As of March 24, nearly 30 million had yet to receive their portion, largely because the Social Security Administration had “not sent the necessary payment...

We are about to witness, for the first time, the power of a fully operational Affordable Care Act (ACA). The American Rescue Plan made 3.7 million more people eligible for the ACA’s premium subsidies. The Biden administration had already opened up enrollment after taking office, and 200,000 Americans signed up in the first two weeks. Now the administration is extending enrollment until August 15, backed by millions of dollars in advertising. Insurers are expanding into new markets, and some who abandoned it long ago in the law’s fraught early years are now reentering. The individual mandate is gone, but, as...

The New York Times economist Paul Krugman tried to hoodwink Americans by downplaying inflation concerns brought on by President Joe Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Krugman’s new op-ed was headlined, “How Not to Panic About Inflation.” The article was published just a few days before Axios released a story headlined, “77% of Americans are worried about inflation.” Krugman’s tactic was to get Americans to remember the “great inflation scare of 2010-2011.” He argued that conservative worries about inflation failed to materialize after former President Barack Obama injected the economy with his own asinine stimulus. His only criticism of Obama’s...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told lawmakers Tuesday that the economy is recovering more quickly than expected but he doesn’t expect the $1.9 trillion stimulus package will lead to too much inflation. “We might see some upward pressures on prices. Our best view is that the effect on inflation will be neither particularly large nor persistent,” Powell said.

“There’s more first time gun buyers than I ever seen before, I mean, there’s been certain times when political events have caused you know people to think more about guns or a lot of new gun buyers come out but this time has just been on fire with I think in January several million more new gun buyers on the market and I think we just continue to see that,” Smith said. At John Brown’s Armory in Beaver Country, Pennsylvania, it is a similar story. The shop has seen steady sales since the outbreak of the pandemic a year ago,...

While there are plenty of people whose lives have been thrown into chaos by the lockdowns imposed on us in the name of protecting against Covid, the “free money” sent out without a single Republic vote in Congress went to a lot of people who didn’t really need it. The checks amount to Democrats buying votes, so why should they limit the purchase to the truly needy?A report from Goldman Sachs, which watches financial flows closely, stated (via MarketWatch):“These payments may be making their way into mutual funds and ETFs, as well as other assets,” the Goldman analysts wrote. “All...

This provision Democrats specifically wrote into the American Rescue Plan pushes a blurred vision of ‘social equity’ by providing relief for farmers based on the color of their skin. Last week, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law. The bill, comprised of $1.9 trillion in the name of “COVID relief,” received no support from Republicans in the House or Senate, and it’s not hard to see why. The legislation includes carveouts for dozens of leftist priorities, including a bridge in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s New York and a tunnel in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Silicon...

<p>Four people, including a seven-year-old girl, were killed after an argument over a stimulus check ended in gunfire. Officials with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said that Malik Halfacre, 25, got into an argument with Jeanettrius Moore, who is the mother of his six-month-old daughter. He demanded at least half of her $1,400 stimulus check, but she refused to give him anything.</p>

Certainly, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, provided some targeted COVID aid:$473 billion in payments to individuals, $75 billion in cash for vaccines, $26 billion to restaurants, $15 billion to help fund airline payrolls, and another $7.2 billion in Paycheck Protection Program funding for small businesses.The bill also contained about $1 trillion in non-COVID related spending, pork, and policy changes.For example, the original bill included a hike in the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Even the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined that move would cost the U.S. economy $1.4 million jobs.A quick spotlight on agencies...

The man suspected of fatally shooting a family of four at a home in Indianapolis on Saturday night reportedly flew into a rage when his former partner refused to split her recent $1,400 stimulus check with him. Malik Halfacre, 25, demanded Jeanettrius Moore give him half of her COVID-19 relief payment in an argument that culminated in the deaths of four people, including a child, the victim's family says. Officers initially responded to reports of a shooting at 253 North Randolph Street just after 9:35 p.m. to find a woman shot in the upper back, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department...

Today’s everything bubble has been inflated by the extraordinarily low-interest rates produced by the massive amount of central bank money printing in response to the coronavirus pandemic. This raises the question as to what happens when the pleasant easy money music stops and interest rates start to rise. Past experience would suggest that when that happens, bubbles will start bursting and the emerging market economies will run into serious trouble as money is repatriated to the United States. A basic problem with the Biden $1.9 trillion budget stimulus package is that it risks creating precisely such a scenario of rising...

For the same $6 trillion in expenditure, the government could have given every federal taxpayer a $41,870 check.President Biden just signed his sweeping $1.9 trillion spending package into law. Once this bill hits the books, total taxpayer expenditure on (ostensibly) COVID relief will hit $6 trillion—which, roughly estimated, comes out to $41,870 in spending per federal taxpayer. Did you see anywhere near that much in benefit?The sheer immensity of this spending is hard to grasp. For context, $6 trillion is more than one-fourth of what the US economy produces in an entire year, according to Fox Business. The COVID spending...

Democrats want to use stimulus money to make you into the people populating Disney's cartoon 'Wall-E.' Instead, turn it into a weapon for antifragility.Democrats’ fifth round of “coronavirus” “stimulus” will soon hand another $1,400 in government debt, plus interest, to every American man, woman, and child in 90 percent of U.S. households. It’s clear this is yet another round of hush money meant to keep Americans quiet and distracted while Democrats restructure the United States into a larger version of their failed uniparty state, California.While COVID times have been obviously worse than the four years of prosperity and freedom under...

Now that the $1.85 trillion Biden stimulus is officially being deployed with tens of millions of stimmy checks being sent out this weekend to household across the nation, BofA's Jared Woodard writes that the "most important question" in for investors in 2021 is "what will US households do with their extra money as the economy fully reopens?" or in other words, where will all those stimmy checks go. And while the consensus is that the record “savings glut” will be spent, will the consensus be wrong again? Here, BofA sees two possible outcomes:Big Spending: a sustained real-economy consumption boom, higher...

Now that Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill has been signed into law, the wait is on for the sweeping package’s $1,400 stimulus checks. So when will you receive your direct payment?The earliest batches of payments, coming in direct deposits, could start hitting accounts as early as this weekend, officials with the Internal Revenue Service said Friday evening. More payments are on the way this upcoming week, according to IRS and Treasury Department officials.Paper checks and pre-loaded debit cards will start arriving in the coming weeks, they said. The IRS said it will not load the third round of payments...

The taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) put its left-wing bent on full display when it did cheerleading for President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic equivalent of a sugar binge. Enjoy the high, America. NPR Chief Economics Correspondent Scott Horsley slapped an absurd headline on his latest piece: “Biden's $1.9 Trillion Rescue Plan Set To Turbocharge U.S. Economy.” Horsley, notorious for acting like a stenographer for former President Barack Obama, embraced his new pro-Biden schtick. He pivoted off the coronavirus vaccine rollout to quip how “[t]he U.S. economy is about to get a shot of its own.” The Heritage Foundation saw...

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina took issue with a proposed $5 billion fund for debt repayment that would benefit historically disenfranchised Black farmers in the $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, calling it “reparations.” if you’re socially disadvantaged, if you’re African American, some other minority. But if you’re [a] white person, if you’re a white woman, no forgiveness.

President Biden speaks frequently and presumably with sincerity about his goal of national unity. His comparative invisibility, somnolent manner, and reluctance to interact even with the docile national political media (which conducted his campaign for him last year), assure a cooler temperature and calmer political atmosphere than was possible in the pyrotechnics and abrasions of the Trump era. This phenomenon is reflected in the heavy declines in viewership of the news channels-over 40 percent on CNN, similar drops on MSNBC, and rather less than that on Fox News. Trump was the great newsmaker, both for those who loved and those...

**SNIP** The letter, which was also signed by Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) did not specify how much any future payments should be, but progressives have voiced support for monthly $2,000 checks. "One more check is not enough during this public health and economic crisis," said the letter signed last month by Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and the other lawmakers. But this third stimulus check passed because it was part of budget reconciliation, requiring only a straight majority in the upper house, and so avoided the need for Republican support in the...