Hundreds of billions of $$$ were wasted by federal, state, and local governments on a fairly harmless disease!
Unfortunately, all this happened in the critical election year 2020! If the Chinese communists are behind the release of the SARS-CoV-2, then their timing was impeccable!
"All told, Congress has authorized about $5.9 trillion in spending to address the social and economic fallout from the pandemic, of which $4.1 trillion has been disbursed or committed through the present ... results bode poorly for proponents of “big government.”
Take, for example, the plight of the Small Business Administration, which operates two marquee pandemic programs. The first is the $813 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), involving federal loan guarantees, set at a low interest rate (1 percent), which could be forgiven if the borrower spends a certain percentage (about two‐thirds) on payroll. The second is the $367 billion Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, which entails loans on favorable terms that are disbursed directly by the government. ... these programs has jeopardized more than $260 billion in taxpayer money.
Next, consider $500 billion in state bailouts. The purpose of this spending was to head off a collapse in state budgets due to an expected decline in consumption, which in turn was supposed to cause a sharp decrease in state tax revenues. The bailout came in two phases. The first phase—$150 billion provided by the CARES Act—occurred at the outset of the pandemic, when there was true uncertainty about how the economy would endure lockdowns. But by the second phase of spending—$350 billion in the American Rescue Plan of 2021—it was clear that state revenues were doing far better than initially expected ..."
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