By John J. Duncan Jr.

duncanj@knoxfocus.com

I don't blame anyone for cashing any of the Covid Relief checks sent out in 2020 and 2021, but everyone would have been better off if all this money had not been sent out.

Everyone is paying for it now in the inflation that was caused mostly by these checks and the other covid relief money that the Congress approved.

Howard Gleckman, Senior Fellow at the Tax Policy Center said "With the benefit of hindsight, you could probably say it was unnecessary."

Erica York, Senior Economist for the Tax Foundation, said "There's inflation across the board. I think it's driven not just by the stimulus payments but by the size of the relief overall."

Checks were sent out under three bills:  Cares Act, March 27, 2020, 1.9 trillion; Coronavirus Relief Act, Dec 27, 2020, 900 billion; and American Rescue Plan Act, March 11, 2021, 2.2 trillion.

This totaled five trillion dollars, over and above ordinary federal spending. Mr. Gleckman said this was "massively bigger" than anything the government had ever done before.

By far the biggest parts of spending in these bills were in the checks sent out to the 90% of American people who received them.

A family of four – two adults, two children – could have received $11,400 whether they needed it or not.

The airlines received $50 billion they didn't need. Many businesses received Payroll Protection Plan money that they didn't need.

The states and local governments received $350 billion, and the only ones that really needed it were the poorly-run cities and states where Democrat-controlled city councils and state legislatures had spent money they didn't have for years and had gone deeply in debt.

The easiest thing in the world to do is to spend other people's money. Democrats in control of Congress added more than eight trillion to our national debt over the last couple of years, running it up to over an astounding thirty trillion.

Now it is very clear that the government at all levels greatly overreacted to the covid scare.

Trump had the economy booming with gas less than half of what it is now and very little inflation.

But egged on by the national media and the many millions who absolutely hated President Trump, Democrats used covid to unnecessarily scare people and shut down much of the economy.

This made a few billionaires out of Big Pharma executives, who ran the biggest sales, public relations, and lobbying jobs in history.

By some estimates, at least one million small businesses went under and several million worldwide were injured by the vaccines but are not permitted to sue.

In the 1957-58 flu season, at least 200,000 Americans died from Asian Flu and possibly as many as four million around the world. Nothing was shut down and gas and inflation did not go way up.

Every year from 30,000 to 60,000 Americans die from flu. Covid apparently replaced the flu, but the CDC said 94% of covid deaths were with co-morbidities that could have been the cause.

But Congress foolishly gave the hospitals more money for every covid related death.

My new wife's husband had Lou Gehrig's Disease for the last five years of their marriage and couldn't even speak for the last two. He died a few months before my late wife clearly from ALS, but it was classified as a covid death when it clearly was not.

Jane Fonda said shortly before the 2020 election, that covid was a "gift to the Left." They rode it for all it was worth because they knew they could not beat Trump without it.

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