Congress is busying itself attempting to do what it does best, and that would be spending money.
In this case, they are working on a “stimulus” bill in response to COVID-19. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says she’s willing to “settle” for a $3.4 trillion spending bill and says she’s not budging from that number.
The Republicans, for their part, are talking about a $1 trillion plan, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin calling the price tag for the Democrat bill “ridiculous.”
It may indeed be ridiculous, but perhaps the GOP plan is ridiculous as well—just to a lesser degree.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., one of the few voices of reason left in Congress, recently said this:
“So we were already running a trillion dollars short just with our normal budgetary expenses for the year. We added three trillion [with the CARES Act]. Now they’re talking about another one to two trillion. We’re going to borrow $5 trillion in five months. I remember when conservatives complained about George W. Bush borrowing $5 trillion in eight years … [Obama] was a piker compared to their borrowing that they’re doing now…You can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep borrowing another trillion dollars every couple of months.”
But like everything else associated with our national battle against COVID-19, the long-term consequences of our actions are irrelevant to the discussion in the short-term. This is especially true when it comes to government spending, which has been developed to an art form in the halls of the United States Congress.
This is Brian Myers with your Caffeinated Thought of the Week.
