Given the fact that the federal government’s complete and absolute fck-up of preparations for this pandemic — including wasting three months calling it a “hoax” — is largely responsible for the near total meltdown of the economy, (everything has stopped because we don’t even know who or how many are infected), I guess it’s only right that the feds are talking about cutting us all checks.
Me, I’m not alone in seeing $1000 per adult as a kind of cheesy reelection bribe from Team Trump. “Here’s a grand. Sorry about bullshitting you about that hoax stuff and you then losing your job, blowing through your pitiful savings in a month and having to call off your daughter’s wedding and sell your truck and fishin’ boat. But hey! Buy yourself a beer. Let’s Keep America Great!”
But $1000 is something. Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has been making the case that Jared and Pence and the Hollywood foreclosure king Steve Mnuchin better be prepared to cut a lot more checks if they’re serious about saving the majority of us from economic perdition. Of course, whether they care that much about anything other than the next election and their place in the annals of history’s greatest scoundrels and fools remains to be seen.
It’s encouraging that DC Democrats, sensing blood in the water for Trump and his enablers, have zeroed in on language to prevent the usual suspects, executives and stockholders, from their customary skim job whenever the gummint is handing out panic money.
Yesterday Andrew Ross Sorkin of “Too Big to Fail” fame started talking up what at first glance seems like a good idea, essentially a very … very … fat zero-intersst loan-cum-grant package to every affected employer to maintain payroll and lease/rent costs until some adults can ride in and turn this thing around.
Not being a Nobel laureate I can’t say if that is the best option out there right now. But anything that compensates airline executives, to take just one example, for stuffing their faces with stock buybacks and the resulting bonuses from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s trillion dollar 2017 tax givaway instead of contingency planning for, you know, rainier days will be a scandal atop a catastrophe. The money — loans like Obama gave the auto industry, not grants — has to go, must go, to sustaining employees almost exclusively. (Here’s another good airline screed.)
Trump, ever the clueless idiot, has talked about bailing out the cruise industry. As if Norwegian Cruise Lines and others, nearly all of which are registered off shore and pay next to nothing in U.S. taxes are some kind of vital industry. FFS! Far better we zero in on the guys that run the corner beer and pizza joint and their minimum wage workers.
And what of non-profits, many of which provide vital public services the pernicious “small government” crowd loves to mock if not ignore? Are they going to be rolled into the check-writing frenzy?
Very ironically, the whole thing is almost exactly what Andrew Yang was talking about for past year. (I also thought the best way to provide everyone $1000 a month in Universal Basic Income was by forcing Google, Facebook, Experian, VISA and every other corporate monolith to compensate individual Americans for the constant trading and profiteering off our personal information. But that’s just me.)
This whole episode is — no big revelation here — an astonishing shit show. One that wouldn’t be nearly as bad had the U.S. government been under the control of competent, experienced, functioning adults and not a clown car of frauds and grifters. But that Hillary … and those e-mails … .
The question I leave you with as we hunker in our caves, when we’re not day-drinking and over-walking the dog, is pretty basic: Does any fck up by any other American administration — and the Iraq war wasn’t even 20 years ago — come close to comparing with this?
Quick answer: No.