Rescue me

An email from the House Budget Committee this morning forwards a copy of Rep. Jason Smith’s Washington Examiner column “One year later: Why Biden’s ‘American Rescue’ failed.” It makes a good companion to my translation of Biden’s remarks in the adjacent post. Rep. Smith zooms in on the details as he has learned them to date:

During the debate on the House floor, the Democratic chairman of the House Budget Committee said, “There’s no money wasted in this legislation.” He could not have been more wrong. In fact, billions of dollars have been wasted or mismanaged by state and local governments. As millions of people were left standing on the sidelines because of COVID-19 lockdown policies, state and local politicians saw an opportunity to use billions of federal tax dollars to pay for pet projects they had been promising voters for years, completely unrelated to COVID.

For example, President Biden’s home state of Delaware is spending $40 million of “emergency COVID-19 funding” to build libraries, New Jersey is spending $15 million on a sports complex, and Syracuse, New York, is pushing $2 million to plant trees. The city of Philadelphia has proposed spending $18 million to literally hand out free money via a universal basic income pilot program.

It gets worse. Stimulus checks as large as $1,400 were sent to Japanese citizens living in Japan. Checks went to convicted prisoners, including the Boston Marathon bomber. Michigan is spending $400 million to upgrade state parks and trails, a city in Connecticut is spending almost $1 million to build 40 luxury apartments, and Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, is spending nearly $17 million to build a golf course with a two-story clubhouse and driving range.

Most bizarrely, nearly $2 billion was sent to county governments that do not even exist.

That is just a sample of what we have discovered at the House Budget Committee, and surely, the list goes on.

Whole thing here.

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