Biden’s Massive Stimulus Is About Politics, Not the Economy – By Alan Calandro (The American Spectator) / Mar 24 2021
This bill is kicking the U.S. economy while it’s already down — and trying mightily to get back up on its own.
Since the pandemic began early last year, the federal government has passed three stimulus packages totaling $5.15 trillion: including $2.35 trillion in March/April 2020; $900 billion in December 2020; and $1.9 trillion in March 2021 (the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, or ARPA). This total, by the way, does not include efforts of the U.S. Federal Reserve that could exceed $4 trillion.
$5.15 trillion sure seems like a lot of money, but what makes the pandemic spending “huge” in absolute terms is the continued growth in debt by 1) the consistent inability of the federal government to limit itself to only the revenue it has, and 2) the size of U.S. overall debt in comparison to the size of the economy (the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, the total value of goods and services produced, which was $21.43 trillion in 2019).
The annual budget for the United States in 2019 was $4.45 trillion. But that budget was adopted with only enough revenue to cover 80 percent of it, so, 20 percent or $0.9 trillion was borrowed. Since 1968, our federal leaders have produced a balanced budget only four times in 52 years. With almost constant annual planned deficits, the federal debt has grown from $271 billion in 1957 and has never been reduced. Consider the last hyper-polarized budget stalemate in 2018–19 between Trump and Congress. The two sides couldn’t come to a consensus, so they eventually “compromised” on an 8 percent increase in spending.
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