As Eric Boehm observes, the federal government recently ran out of money to treat the uninsured for the coronavirus, because it spent so much money on wasteful garbage in the name of “coronavirus relief”:
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, Congress has authorized $884 billion in aid for state and local governments, $62 billion for colleges and universities, and $869 billion in direct payments to Americans, including to individuals who earned as much as $90,000 annually and never lost their income due to the pandemic.
And now, it turns out, there’s no money left to actually help those suffering from COVID-19 who can’t afford to pay for treatments….Without additional funding for the program, the “consequences are dire,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday. It would mean “fewer monoclonal antibodies sent to states, an inability to purchase additional treatments, fewer tests available to Americans, less surveillance for future variants, and a risk of running short on vaccines.”
Too bad so much of the federal government’s COVID relief funding was spent on everything but COVID relief… lawmakers used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to throw money around in ways that would be comedic if the results weren’t so tragic…Out of more than $5.7 trillion in COVID-related spending authorized by Congress (which doesn’t include actions taken by the Federal Reserve or executive branch agencies to respond to the pandemic), [a report] classifies a scant $682 billion—less than 12 percent—as “health spending.”
Of that amount, only $53 billion—that’s less than 1 percent of all COVID aid authorized by Congress—was spent on vaccines and other treatments.
In other words, there was plenty of money that could have been used to fund this program that provides COVID treatments to uninsured Americans….But Congress and the executive branch…utterly failed at the most basic task.
Foreign criminals received countless billions of dollars from America’s pandemic unemployment funds. Such handouts were paid for with government borrowing that has increased America’s national debt to a point where it is now much bigger than our economy.
The New York Post suggested that half of America’s pandemic unemployment money may have been stolen, with foreign scammers collecting many billions of dollars. In 2021, California officials acknowledged they may have paid as much as $31 billion worth of unemployment funds to criminals, in massive insurance scams. The true amount of fraud may be far higher.
Prison inmates got $1,400 stimulus payments under the COVID relief law that President Biden signed in March. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) objected to that, saying prisoners have “their living and medical expenses paid for by the taxpayer,” “don’t pay taxes,” and “can’t be unemployed. Inmates are not economically impacted by COVID.” Senator Tom Cotton noted that “Dylann Roof murdered nine people,” yet “he’ll be getting a $1,400 stimulus check as part of the Democrats’ ‘COVID relief’ bill.”
