Money spent fighting Covid didn’t go to fight Covid — but the press won’t talk about that
February 9, 2022
Only 15 percent of the money that Congress has voted to fight Covid over the last two years has actually gone to getting rid of the virus, according to the Washington Times today in the first part of a six-part series aimed at looking at the past two years of Covid policy.
But don’t expect to hear about it from the major outlets. They’d rather talk about taxing millionaires and billionaires or giving out student loan forgiveness or the newsroom bailout that was tucked into an infrastructure bill than talk about the money we misused on the pandemic.
“On overall levels of spending, we missed badly,” Andrew Lautz, director of federal policy at the National Taxpayers Union told the Washington Times about the overspending problem.
“I don’t want to suggest the federal government should have spent nothing,” Lautz said. “This was a multitrillion-dollar public health and economic problem that very likely over the course of several years required a multitrillion-dollar response. I think $5 trillion was an overshoot.”
It’s even worse than that. The total cost for Covid wasn’t $5 trillion, rather, it was more than $12 trillion if one includes the measures taken by the Federal Reserve to support the economy.
When compared to the $662 billion in health spending approved by Congress to “fight” Covid, it means we spent only about four percent on directly “fighting” Covid.
Only $228 billion of that $662 billion has been dispersed two years into the pandemic, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Covid Money Tracker.
Consider this: The Trump and the Biden administrations have spent nearly $1 trillion on administrative costs alone to “fight” Covid.
“The $50 billion or so aimed at vaccines and therapeutics is less than Congress allocated for an Obamacare expansion, tucked into the same pandemic spending bills,” said the Washington Times. “Another $53 billion allocated to coronavirus testing and monitoring is dwarfed by an $81 billion bailout for private pension funds that Democrats stuck inside their massive American Rescue Plan bill last year.”
So where is the media outrage on this?
As the media continues to pick quarrels between those who are masked and unmasked, those who are vaxxed and unvaxxed, doesn’t the media at least have an obligation to call out the abuse of the national checkbook while they complain that people were dying because Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis kept his state’s economy open?
Several weeks ago the media was agog with the idea that giving cash money to poor mothers would help babies, in a clear attempt by the media at getting more spending for social programs.
Vox, Axios, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest were breathless about it.
By that same reasoning, wouldn’t spending more on fighting the actual disease of Covid, on therapeutics and vaccines, also help the rest of us?
If we were to have spent, for example, $2 trillion of the $12 trillion on tests, vaccines and therapeutics, for example, we’d be a lot farther ahead today in mitigating Covid.
And maybe, with that kind of spending, we wouldn’t be fighting about the safety of the vaccines that were rushed to production. Or about the efficacy of lockdowns or the utility of masks on airplanes.
The press has played upon our pandemic fears to advance their own pet projects under the guise of Covid.
@mattconvard #greenscreen government spending go brrr ??? #fyp #foryou #republican #democrat #conservative #AVrboForTogether #SoFiBreakUpChallenge #AlaskaAirCAREoke ? original sound – mattconvard