Skjellyfetti wrote: ↑Tue Sep 12, 2023 7:42 pm
GannonFan wrote: ↑Tue Sep 12, 2023 7:19 amthe runaway government spending, first a smaller amount by Trump on the way out, and then a much larger amount by Biden several months later
Trump signed $2.2 trillion CARES act in March 2020
Trump signed $484 billion Paycheck Protection Program in April 2020
Trump signed $2.3 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act in December 2020 - I assume this is the one you meant "on his way out." But, it wasn't the only one.
That's about $5 trillion in Covid relief by Trump
Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021
"A smaller amount by Trump" (~5 trillion) "a much larger amount by Biden." (~2 trillion)
Wat
Wow, I didn't peg you for being dishonest, but then you go and throw a post out like that and it can't be labeled anything other than dishonest.
First of all, COVID spending at the start of the pandemic has never really been in doubt or criticized in terms of whether it was needed. The government shut down the economy, of course the government would then have to pump money into the country to make up for ceasing a good chunk of economic activity. None of that is in doubt or contested.
As for the bill Trump signed in December of 2020, yes I believe the COVID relief part of that to be excessive. But you're being dishonest by saying the bill was $2.3 trillion. As the bill says, it was a consolidated appropriations bill. The COVID relief part of that bill was about $900 billion dollars. The rest was money to fund the government and was going to be roughly that number regardless of anything else. The COVID part was the add-on, and considering it was almost half of a bill where the other half was just what we needed to fund the government, it certainly points to it being excessive.
That just puts it into even more perspective when you consider Biden's $1.9 trillion dollar package, entirely for COVID relief, came on the heels of the bill 4 months before that we knew 4 months ago we probably didn't need. So if we didn't need $900 billion in December, we certainly didn't need more than twice that just in March. It's no coincidence either that you see the inflation start to tick up a few months after the passing of this bill in March and when the money started to impact the money supply in the country. It's also no coincidence that it was only after this bill was passed that the administration started putting out the talking points that inflation was only transitory - everyone knew the connection between excessive government spending and it's impact on inflation. Heck, we still know that today.
To take up kalm's point, it's not like this is Monday morning quarterbacking - there was significant debate even in the lame duck session when Trump added the $900 billion to the appropriations bill. And there was 10x that debate when Biden was insistent to pass something, anything, to look like he cared even more. Remember, vaccines were coming out and were widely available by March and April of 2021. The COVID emergency, from the standpoint of a shutdown economy, was no longer an issue. Heck, good portions of the economy were already back and up and running in the summer of 2020 even long before vaccines became available. So yes, we can certainly say that government spending to prop up the economy was really no longer needed by the summer of 2020. Biden's bill came about 10 months too late, and was even more harmful as it included weird and unnecessary things like extending enhanced unemployment benefits until September of 2021 or even beyond. Heck, we're only just now a month away today from restarting student loan payments. I don't think there's any reasonable argument that can counter the idea that we extended COVID reliefs way past when they were needed. Obviously, we were using COVID relief as cover to try to implement policy changes by other means.
So to sum it up, and to counter Skellie's blatantly dishonest post, Trump passed $900B of unnecessary spending in December of 2020, Biden then passed a wholly unnecessary $1.9T in March of 2021, even well before he added other measures such as the much maligned-named Inflation Reduction Act and other new spending. The question of excessive government spending and its impact on inflation has been definitively proved on the macro scale for the past two years.
About 920 billion of that was extra so called Covid spending. The rest was regualr appropriations. Edit: GF beat me to it.