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The $1.9 Trillion Biden Spending Plan Is Even Worse Than You Think

The latest $1.9 trillion omnibus spending bill pending in Congress is in addition to last year’s $3.4 trillion COVID-related health and economic stimulus spending bills.  Estimates of this new massive bailout put the actual appropriation of taxpayer funding related to health costs at a meaningless nine percent of the total new bloat. 

What will we get for the $1.9 trillion in new deficit spending?  This is all nothing more than a crafty direct federal taxpayer subvention to blue states and large urban corridors that otherwise could never justify any other state’s taxpayer bailout for their years of irresponsible, profligate government waste.

Take for example California, whose commanding government employee unions control every facet of that state’s budget allocations and whose public pension plans, the most generous in the nation, now demand extraordinary funding at all levels of government.  This political turkey has now come home to roost.        

But California, like New York and Illinois, have another big problem.  Their state’s productive classes — you know, the people who actually create the wealth and economic vitality that permit such largess — are now leaving those states in droves rendering enormous potential tax deficits in their wake.  What to do?

Call in the cavalry — or in this case, “F-Troop”.  Dr. Fauci, the goofy corporal of functional health bureaucrats, has dutifully continued his Lockdown Fears Tour sufficient to permit his enablers in Washington D.C. to craft a wildly off-the-reservation so-called stimulus spending proposal designed to transfer the wealth of responsible working states to cover the big government malfeasance of the irresponsible ones.

If you still wonder why states like California, New York, and Illinois continue on a path of lockdowns despite a year’s worth of health data verifying the converse, one need only look only at Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus proposal to understand the want of blue states to keep their citizens restricted, frustrated and on the dole.

After a full year of governments at all levels first began shutting down our economies for “30 days to slow the virus spread”, only the bluest of states continue to restrict their population’s ability to earn a living.  And despite sound research showing the counterproductive health consequences of lockdowns, those blue state’s motivations for continuing their restrictive edicts are becoming ever more evident.

There is a growing, observable contrast developing in the country between the positive health outcomes in states which have been working and re-opening their economies and the coastal deep blue states who remain under strict lockdowns.  Those who continue to remain closed for business are being exposed as having unnecessarily done more harm to their citizenry than the virus.

In fact, once you understand the true nature of the $1.9 trillion proposal — to channel the nation’s tax dollars to Democrat-controlled blue states and left-wing institutions — you will begin to get a handle on the immoral overreach that defines this stimulus plan and the corrupt manner in which they continue to trade on public fear to maintain the health lie undergirding this preposterous debt-busting pork-barrel bill.

The last time Democrats controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress, in 2009, there was a strong political current to overspend on bailouts to address the recession and credit crisis.  Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — signed 12 years ago this month — was a $787 billion 2-year program to stimulate the economy, but did so in a mostly uniform manner across the states.  Besides the huge Wall Street and banking liquidity portion, it was not a strictly partisan formulation.

The same cannot be said of this Biden $1.9 trillion boondoggle.  While it is couched in terms of health care prevention and jobless recovery, only a very tiny percentage of the spending is actually health-related.  The overwhelming portion of the spending is for blue coastal urban states and left-wing welfare institutions and public-employee organized labor unions.

Most of the tax dollars are actually funneled to California, New York, and Illinois through crude metrics based on unemployment and other coastal urban cost drivers.  The lockdown states whose economies are moribund due to leftist government edicts are the winners and those states who have been responsibly working and open are being told to foot the bill.

This so-called stimulus plan — simply put — directly rewards states that performed dismally and corruptibly over the past year, and punishes those states who were led responsibly and are working and open for business.

That’s about as un-American a concept as can ever be devised.

Lew Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and the National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He was a contemporary and collaborator with Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the country.

Peter Ferrara served as a member of the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush, and the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics at the Kings College in New York.

Joe Yocca is NTLFs Policy Director. A long-time political and policy consultant, Joe served in the California State Senate as chief of staff to the Republican leadership for decades and directed numerous statewide legislative and congressional campaigns throughout his career. 

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27 comments

  • Why not? The red states are mostly parasites on the federal government, from Kentucky to Alabama and Louisiana, . . . parasites taking much more from the federal government than they give. And still they whine.

    • Clearly you have not looked at any of the facts that have been updated over the last 15 years.

      • Obviously you haven’t checked the facts either. Most of the blue states are net donners of tax money while the majority of the red states are takers.

    • With all the people leaving the blue states to red ones, that is starting to switch. High taxed wealthy people and businesses are now moving to friendlier climes because those blue states have decided t over milk them.

    • Apparently social security income is considered part of the payout to states and so for example “New York is a “donor” state insofar as its citizens take their retirement income and move elsewhere.” An interesting article to read if you put my quote in to google to find it. If it is all about fairness then the blue or red governments of their time have had plenty of time to tip the scales to make things “fairer”. If they haven’t then the question is, what is satisfactory about the current way they have things? It isn’t so simple as calculating the net givers vs. the net takers or the problem would have been solved a long time ago.

    • You do understand the numbers you are talking about include Social Security payments. Those are an EARNED benefit paid for by the PEOPLE receiving the money. The way you want to look at the numbers is totally disingenuous.

  • Not to mention, but I will, there is still ONE BILLION unspent from the last boondoggle. But, who’s counting?

  • with Trump I suddenly had $1200 in my account, with biden i get a letter telling me I am getting $600 but no money ever shows up. I wonder how much it cost to send out all those letters. figgin demonrat morons!

    • We got ours long ago, chief. One of your Trumper friends must have stolen yours. But I want to hear you complain after the $1400. check gets to you. Or maybe you’d like to turn it down out of principle or to honor your past charlatan president. You know, the one who gutted the FDA so that unregulated companies could sneak toxins into your granddaughter’s baby food.

  • The word “calvary” at the beginning of the fifth paragraph should be “cavalry”. Our Lord Jesus Christ died on Calvary, but the ‘cavalry’ should be sent in. Thank you

  • states (red?) should begin seceding from the union aka the federales! THis is just the tip of the iceberg IMO. there is much more going on without much publicity that will devastate the USA….immigration transfer to Virginia military base; WWIII is on its way; high gas prices which will affect everything; weakening of the dollar; mega inflation on the horizon;

    Who’s running the show? Why are we still paying taxes? For what? Corruption, fraud, genocide, etc by our government??????

    • Move to Louisiana, bubba. It’s wide open with low taxes there. Most people are conservative and pro-industry, and you only have worry about severely toxic air and water because everyone there hates government regulation of big industry. That also means a pitiful school system and other public amenities — all near last in the nation. But they’re your kind of people.

  • >was a $787 billion 2-year program to stimulate the economy, but did so in a mostly uniform manner across the states

    I hate to quibble, but it did no such thing. It was dollars sprayed from a firehose to various Democrat unions and interest groups. Nothing was “stimulated,” least of all “the economy.”

    • Was that the shovel ready jobs Obama talked about? Or was he alluding to the economy that was going to die with his plan, and they were digging graves for those businesses?

  • I’m a bit confused…this seems to be just a list of conclusions. You really didn’t want to include one *single* detail?

    • Author’s assume that readers have kept up with the some or all “details’ related to the $1.9 Trillion .I have read about the State’s 350 billion bailout allocation; the projected costs of the individual stimulus checks , and the costs associated with teh extension of the unemployment benefits.
      From my perspective the authors are accurate and directionally correct.
      Your remarks are no better than your confusion claim as all you have done is written an asserting conclusion with no detail – so you are spit balling conclusions. Perhaps you could provide some detail that author’s omitted as an example or do you not want to do that either ? Gratitude

      • “Perhaps you could provide some detail that author’s omitted as an example or do you not want to do that either ?”

        Maybe a coherent and rational option as to what they would do…

        But they being “libertarians”, that is a rhetorical question.

  • Next time we control the House and the Senate, we should impeach Piglosi, Schumer, Shifftt, Waters,Swaloow-well, and all members of the squad! Tit-for-tat.

      • Yes, and then you can kiss off freedom in the United States of America, and look forward to living under a Fascist Trump regime, from which you will never get away from unless he dies, whether you like it or not.

  • Ok. This will help a lot of poor people so naturally Republicans oppose. But then they oppose anything and everything from the Democrats anyway, so why pay any attention to them? Imagine – they supported that repulsive criminal donald trump and still do. I don’t even consider them Americans, actually.

    • Jimmy, if you are talking about the tax cut and plan under President Trump, the wage earners in the lowest 10% had the biggest gains, and cut the wealth gap to the lowest since the 70s.

  • Ho hum. Republicans always oppose anything Democrats do. Above all, they hate worse than the Gates of Hell helping the poor. They’re much happier giving welfare tax cuts to the wealthy.

    • Jimmy I think you are forgetting you are talking of democRATS and not Republicans,

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