Tag Archives: inflation

Trump offers to pay the taxpayers with money from the taxpayers

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The unique “Midterm Convention” by the Republicans in Dallas this week featured the faithful filling an arena (mostly, but there were quite a few empty seats) to hear the faith (mostly, but a Democrat Senator, too, spoke by video).

I’ve voted Republican since Ronald Reagan, including three times for Donald Trump. I didn’t think I would learn anything by watching the spectacle, and I didn’t think it would be amusing entertainment, so I didn’t watch.

But I did hear that President Trump promised to pay each adult citizen $5,000 if the Republicans hold both houses of Congress in November. I have two thoughts on this.

First, the odds that he’ll ever pay the $5,000 are approximately zero. The Republicans are sure to lose the House, and stand a good chance of losing the Senate as well. Even on the slim chance that they hold both, the $5,000 payments would require an act of Congress. The odds that Congress would go along are approximately, well, zero.

The odds that the Republicans will hold both houses of Congress, and Congress will go along with the $5,000 payments, are, if my math still serves, approximately zero times approximately zero, which is well nigh . . . zero.

So, don’t spend the money yet.

My second thought is that this money amounting to something over $1,000,000,000 has to come from somewhere. Oh, you say, it just gets printed.

But didn’t we learn for the umpteenth time during the Biden administration that money that “just gets printed” still comes from somewhere? Didn’t we learn that it comes from us, through inflated prices?

If that were not the case, then why make the payments only $5,000? Couldn’t we all be rich by letting the government simply print and mail to each of us $5,000,000?

Heck, why stop there? Let’s all be as rich as Elon Musk by having the government print and mail to each of us, say, a trillion dollars.

Okay, I said I have two thoughts on the matter, but actually I have three. Trump thinks we’re stupid.

COVID was like Ferris Bueller’s Two Years Off

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In a COVID panic, we told people to stop working. It became not only permissible not to work, it became a mandate. Sitting around the house watching daytime TV in pajamas became the responsible thing to do. With no one working, unsurprisingly, no work got done. It was like a two-year snow day. Or Ferris Bueller’s Two-Years Off. Democrats loved it, of course, because Democrats hate work.

COVID killed nearly a million Americans (though most had what the doctors euphemistically call “comorbidities”). And the lockdowns and mandates for masks, vaccines and social distancing (at least when one wasn’t rioting) were bad. And the lost year or two of learning for an entire generation was tragic (though we could make that up in four months if we improved the schools and tamed the teachers unions).

But the most destructive outcome of COVID was the destruction of the American work ethic. That’s the ethic — now considered a quaint notion — that work is good. It’s good for the pocketbook, good for the soul, and good for society.

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They lie – they overplayed COVID dangers, and now they’re underplaying COVID inflation

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Early in the pandemic, Dr. Fauci said, “there’s no reason to be walking around wearing a mask.” He said masks might cause more harm than good.

In the kind of pirouette for which he’s now famous, Fauci later told us all to wear masks indoors and out. Fauci himself starting wearing two at a time. (Why not three?) His baffled boss, Joe Biden, wears them for Zoom calls – even though he’s been fully vaccinated.

As it turned out, Fauci lied about his reason for initially telling us not to wear masks. The real reason was that he wanted to save them for doctors such as himself.

Fine, Fauci didn’t want to spark mask hoarding similar to the toilet paper hoarding we saw early on. (By the way, how’s that closet full of toilet paper working out for you hoarders?) In short, they lied to us to protect us.

But lying is not the way to manage grownups. Fauci should have explained that masks are probably effective to some degree, but that for a few weeks we needed to save them for front-line health workers who were in daily contact with the virus.

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