The Slippery Slope Is Right In Front Of Us and To Too Many of Us It Looks To Be Very Inviting | Eastern North Carolina Now

There Is A Lot Of Foolishness In This Blog Posting But There Is Nothing Funny In This Blog Posting

    Even the easily fooled among us can see the dangers of Going Over A Cliff but many of the easily fooled are looking at the Slippery Slope and thinking, “That does not look as bad a Going Over A Cliff Would Be. By Golly, I Think I Will Give It A Try”.

    What they don’t understand is at the bottom of the cliff and at the bottom of the slope is The Bottom. Climbing back up the Cliff would be very difficult and climbing back up the Slippery Slope would be even more difficult.

What the heck am I talking about? Pardon me. I thought you knew. I’m talking about the $3 Trillion (remember that’s 3 thousand billion dollars) Bill to fight the Coronavirus that has little to do with the Coronavirus that has passed the House of Representatives.

    Too many members of our 9% Approval Rated Congress may say they believe there is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch but this bill makes it abundantly clear they believe there is Such A Thing As A Free Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.

    It is time for one of my Bullet Point Listings...

• This bill essentially attempts to replace the Private Economy crushed by the Coronavirus Shutdown with Old, New and Expanded Government Programs.
• It uses the economic damage caused by the government shutdowns as an opening for a huge expansion of the welfare state that would keep millions of Americans on the government payroll into 2021 and make the private recovery that much slower.
• The bill contains $915 billion more for state and local governments.
• This is on top of the $150 billion in direct aid states already received and hundreds of billions in the Federal Reserve’s cut-rate loan program.
• Even that low-balls the state windfall, because they also get a 14-point formula increase in Medicaid matching payments and $100 billion for schools.
• There’s also $175 billion for housing assistance.
• There is also $160 billion in the bill for repealing the $10,000 cap on deductible state and local taxes.
• This is the first step in repealing the 2017 tax reform.
• The individual and corporate tax increases will come next year.
• Keep in mind the feds already fund about a third of state spending but this bill would take that up well above 50% for many states, and would especially help those states with high relative Medicaid rolls and large public-housing populations. It would make the 2009 bailout for public union state governance look cheap.
• The bill would extend the extra $600 in unemployment insurance through Jan. 31, 2021.
• This means that about half of the U.S. workforce will earn more by not working than returning to their jobs.
• It guarantees that the jobless rate, which may reach 20% in May, will stay high through the rest of the year.
• Democrats can then blame Donald Trump for the high unemployment this Democratic legislation sustains.
• Even at $3 trillion the House included nothing to fund the Paycheck Protection Program for small business.
• So the bill doesn’t help private businesses keep workers on the payroll, but it does keep people longer on the government payroll.
• It also mandates paid family leave by businesses through the end of 2021 and removes the small-business exemption.
• The bill also proposes another round of $1,200 rebate checks to individuals, this time including a similar amount for up to three dependents.
• This would cost about $383 billion and is best understood as the down payment on a guaranteed annual wage that will be part of the House Democratic agenda next year.
• The U.S. Postal Service gets a $25 billion blank check.
• The marijuana industry gets access to cheap financing, though it’s still a felony to sell pot in most of the country.
• There’s $3.6 billion for elections along with a command to the states to allow 15 days of early voting. This is part of the House plan for federal control of state election law that the Senate has killed in the past.

    This bill is so complicated that the Bill’s Executive Summary alone is 90 pages long. 

   My Dear Reader, look around. This is the Bottom of the Cliff and/or the Slippery Slope. Don’t bother trying to claw your way back up. There ain’t no way.

    Would I kid u?

    Smartfella

Lagniappe: Did you ask how big is the total bill? I did not want to tell you because you might think that the Democrats did not bother to read it because it was too long. Actually the Republicans did not read it either. Neither side read it because it was too long. The only way they could find out what was in it was to pass it because it was 1,815 pages long.