Does Biden’s $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill Include a Mileage Tax?

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Here’s a dismaying prospect: Paying 6, 8, or 10 cents in new taxes for every mile you drive. It may sound small, but at an 8 cent rate, that would be $1,144 in new annual taxes for the average American, who drives about 14,300 miles a year. Yikes!

Some on social media are claiming that this punitive tax scheme has been slipped into President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending legislation—which, after all, is nearly 3,000 pages and is chock full of unrelated waste and partisan pet projects. But are they right to be concerned about a mileage tax soon becoming reality?

No. At least, not yet.

The infrastructure legislation does not include a mileage tax or another form of driving tax. What it does include is a pilot program to study and test the idea. The legislation authorizes $125 million in taxpayer funding for this test initiative. (A lot of taxpayer money for an experiment, no?)

“People would volunteer to be part of the test,” fact-checkers at local New York news outlet WGRZ-TV report. “The test would require volunteers to record their miles, pay the fees, and then be reimbursed by the government. This pilot program would go through the year 2026 and at that point, if Congress and the president like it, they would have to pass another bill making it into law. This infrastructure bill simply creates the program.”

We can certainly question the wisdom of this endeavor. But rest assured that if the infrastructure legislation ultimately passes—a likely if not certain outcome—you won’t get a new per-mile bill from the IRS. However, this move does represent a shift toward mainstreaming and advancing the idea of a per-mile driving tax.

Such a tax would be highly regressive, meaning that it would disproportionately burden low-income Americans. So, too, the costs would fall harder on rural Americans who drive more than their city-dwelling counterparts. That said, proponents argue it simply funds highway infrastructure by taxing those who use it. They also note that it could replace the gas tax, which currently attempts to do the same yet fails to capture usage by electric vehicles.

Still, the prospect of sizable new taxes levied on working-class Americans solely for the privilege of being allowed to drive your own car isn’t an attractive one. Luckily, we aren’t actually facing this as an immediate reality, even if it is slowly being advanced into the mainstream.

WATCH: New Biden Vax Mandate Doesn’t Make ANY Sense (Here’s Why)

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Like this story? Click here to sign up for the FEE Daily and get free-market news and analysis like this from Policy Correspondent Brad Polumbo in your inbox every weekday.

Manchin: Schumer ‘will not have my vote’ on $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill

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Bernie Sanders and the Democrats seeks to inject socialism into America with this monstrosity of a bill. In addition, it has been discovered that this bill would allow the IRS to monitor bank transactions, potentially violating the 4th Amendment. The bill will also grant amnesty to millions of people who have entered the United States illegally. And the bill would provide free community college to Americans, while funding  radical “green” projects in the years ahead. This bill must be stopped. Keep calling Senator Manchin and tell him to vote no.

Manchin: Schumer ‘will not have my vote’ on $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill

By Fox News, September 12, 2021

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Sunday that he will not vote in favor of his party’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, which is a central part of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda and needs the support of all 50 Democratic senators to pass.

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Manchin was asked by anchor Dana Bash to respond to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who said Democrats were moving “full speed ahead” on the package for which Manchin previously called for a “pause.” Manchin, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said his main issue with the package is its hefty price tag.

“He will not have my vote on 3.5 and Chuck knows that,” he said, adding that it should be more like $1.5 trillion. “It’s not going to be three and a half I can assure you.”

Manchin said the bill that Democrats should be primarily focused on is the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed in the Senate and is awaiting House action. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said a vote on that bill would be held on Sept. 27, but progressives have threatened to vote against it if the reconciliation bill is held up in the Senate.

Manchin said there is “no way” the reconciliation will pass this month, and he said progressives are making a big mistake if they follow through on their threat.

“They have to do what they have to do,” he said. “And if they play politics with the needs of America, I can tell you America will recoil.”

Appearing later on ABC’s “This Week,” Manchin criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., after the senator declared on Twitter the day before: “No infrastructure bill without the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.”

“I just respectfully disagree with Bernie,” Manchin told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I’ve never seen this in legislation. I never thought the purposes of the progress we make in legislation was basically to hold one hostage over the other.”

Sanders, who appeared later on the same show, fired back, saying “the real question” is whether it is “appropriate for one person to destroy two pieces of legislation.”

Sanders said that regardless of the party infighting, he expected both bills to eventually pass.

Budget reconciliation rules prevent Republicans from filibustering the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, so Democrats only need a simple majority to pass it. With a 50-50 Senate, Democrats need every senator in their party to vote yes, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Bernie Sanders calls Manchin’s refusal to back $3.5 trillion spending plan ‘absolutely not acceptable’

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Sign the Petition – Tell Bank of America to Focus on Finances, Not Race Division

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PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO BANK OF AMERICA

Bank of America (1.00)  used to help you with checking, savings, and loans. The company was dedicated to making your money work for you.

Today, that’s all changed. Bank of America has become another arm of the woke agenda, declaring that white people should “decolonize” their minds and “accept that white supremacy and institutional racism are real.”

We don’t believe this racist agenda, and nor should you. Therefore, 2ndVote has signed onto the National Center for Public Policy Research’s petition urging Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to get back to banking. From the petition:

Bank of America’s new reeducation program teaches white employees that “regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages,” they are “living a life with white-skin privileges.”

It is time to put an end to Bank of America’s radical and divisive “racial justice” initiatives. Will you stand with us today to put pressure on Bank of America to stay true to its name and stop this un-American racially divisive reeducation program? 

And from a letter to Moynihan the Center is asking Americans to sign:

I do not agree that the United States is a “racialized society” using “race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement and oppression.” Your racial reeducation program sows division and hurts your reputation with customers and shareholders.

I ask you today to uphold true American ideals and stop sponsoring these programs — whether alone or with other organizations — and to stop distributing them to your employees.

Until Bank of America starts putting banking and customers first, conservatives should put our 2ndVote elsewhere. Open accounts with financial companies like Goldman Sachs (3.87) until Bank of America lives up to its name: a bank that is “of America,” supporting values of equality and freedom.

Use your voice. Contact companies like Bank of America through our website to remind them of their American values and to be our bank of America, not a bank encouraging woke culture. Not only do you have the power in your pocket with your money to make change, you have the power in your voice!

EDITORS NOTE: This 2nd Vote column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

One of the Biggest Welfare State Expansions in U.S. History Just Got Approved By the House

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And the whopping $3.5 trillion price tag could even be an underestimate.

It’s another day that ends in y, so, Congress just nonchalantly voted to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars. On Tuesday, the House approved a $3.5 trillion spending resolution on a party-line vote, with Democrats backing the measure and Republicans uniformly opposing it.

“House Democrats passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution on Tuesday, 220-212, advancing the party’s effort to pass a sweeping economic package that would expand the nation’s social safety net,” Axios reports. “Democrats now will be able to use the budget reconciliation process to pass a bill — likely later this fall — by a simple majority, tackling key priorities like health care, child care and climate change.”

The so-called “Human Infrastructure” plan paves the way for further bills allocating these trillions toward enormous expansions of the welfare state across many different areas and industries. It includes education measures like taxpayer funding for “free” community college and “universal” pre-school, as well as healthcare expenditures like expanding Obamacare subsidies—even for the wealthy—and adding more people to government healthcare programs. It also has climate schemes like huge electric vehicle subsidies, the creation of a “Civilian Climate Corps” to supposedly create “green jobs,” and much, much more.

It would honestly be easier to list what’s not in the proposal than what is.

The expense here is truly mind-boggling. Remember that this spending plan comes on the heels of more than $6 trillion in ostensibly-pandemic-related welfare spending and in addition to a $1+ trillion transportation infrastructure bill. And this is all in light of a $28.6 trillion—and counting—national debt. This additional $3.5 trillion bill amounts to, roughly estimated, about $24,400 in new spending per federal taxpayer.

If enacted, this plan would be one of the biggest expansions of government and the welfare state in American history. To put it into context, consider President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the legendary set of government programs enacted in the 1930s that created Social Security and many other forms of welfare still with us today.

Well, the New Deal cost $41.7 billion at the time. And, roughly translated, that’s about $875 billion in today’s dollars. So, the welfare spending plan House Democrats just approved is several times bigger in total cost than the inflation-adjusted New Deal!

The crazy thing is that the $3.5 trillion price may actually be an underestimate.

One of the major provisions in the spending plan is further extending the recently-expanded “child tax credit,” an expensive welfare program that sends regular checks with taxpayer money to families based on how many kids they have.

The $3.5 trillion resolution, when eventually fleshed out into full spending legislation, is likely to reauthorize the tax credit for 2 to 4 years. However, the White House and leaders in Congress have openly said they want to make it permanent. So, we can expect them to simply re-extend it in a few years. They are most likely only doing a shorter extension in this bill to keep the sticker price of the legislation down.

According to American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and Rowe scholar Matt Weidinger, this means the spending plan could ultimately cost up to $1 trillion more than currently advertised. That’s right: the already-exorbitant $3.5 trillion price tag could really be more like $4 trillion or $4.5 trillion in practice.

“If they only extend something for two years but want to make it permanent, all that means is that in two years, someone else is going to have to figure out how to pay for the extension,” Weidinger told me in a phone interview. “But it’s no less of an expectation that they want to make it permanent… they can just only squeeze so much sugar into this 5-pound sack that they’ve created for themselves today.”

Yet, given the sad normalization of profligate spending in Washington DC, some people might unfortunately be unfazed by the prospect of trillions more going out the door. But we should still be alarmed.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees, and somebody has to pay for this,” Weidinger argued. “Whatever the spending promises are today, they will be matched by some tax hikes—including in this legislation—but not nearly enough to actually cover the true cost of this. So, if you want bigger government, more disincentives for people to be working and supporting themselves, and if you want to leave bigger bills for our children and grandchildren to pay, you’re going to love this plan. [If not], you should be quite skeptical of this plan.”

Of course, the headlines and Americans’ attention are understandably concentrated elsewhere, as chaos grips Afghanistan and the pandemic persists. But we cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that Congress is all the while voting away trillions from our pockets and expanding the scope of the welfare state to unprecedented new heights.

COLUMN BY:

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Like this story? Click here to sign up for the FEE Daily and get free-market news and analysis like this from Policy Correspondent Brad Polumbo in your inbox every weekday.

Democrat Autocrats Prep Massive Infrastructure Bill, Plan to Push Through Before Most Can Read It

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The one-party totalitarians are now pushing to pass bills that haven’t even been written or finished, a bill that will certainly bankrupt and ruin this nation.

One Payoff in the Infrastructure Deal Is So Blatantly Corrupt That You Almost Have to Respect the Hustle

From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Schumer wants to rush the bill through so he can move on to Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget resolution that he will then sprint through on a party-line vote. He wants to pass both before the Senate’s August recess. Amendments will often be offered and voted on while the nation sleeps to meet this artificial deadline that is convenient for the political class but not for informing the public. Both parties operate this way now. But it isn’t the right way to run a democracy, and no wonder Americans hold Congress in such low regard (WSJ).

From Ben Shapiro: Total number of people in Congress who will read this before voting: (Twitter).

Dan McLaughlin: At this stage, even the staffers may not read the thing (Twitter).

Another story notes

“The new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill contains billions of dollars to upgrade border crossings — but no money at all for the southern border wall, which President Joe Biden abandoned, despite an ongoing surge of illegal migration (Breitbart).

Democrat Joe Manchin hasn’t said if he’ll vote to approve (Washington Times).

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Here’s the List of the Top 20 States Getting ‘COVID’ Bailout Money [And Why It Raises a Giant Red Flag]

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It’s simply naïve and ignorant of human nature to expect people—especially the kind of people who become politicians—to dole out trillions of dollars without any hint of favoritism or impropriety.

President Biden is taking a victory lap after signing his $1.9 trillion ‘COVID’ spending bill. “Help is here,” he wrote in a tweet promoting his plan.

But Americans who are initially glad to hear that more ‘COVID’ relief is supposedly on its way may be surprised when they learn that the latest legislation funnels $350 billion in unneeded taxpayer money to flush the coffers of state and local governments.

In the president’s telling, this is much-needed aid that will allow municipal governments facing massive COVID-related revenue pitfalls to pay their front-line emergency responders and essential personnel. But the facts reveal a different story.

While it’s plausible on its face to think that COVID would have led to a revenue drop for state and local governments, this never materialized in most places. According to JP Morgan, state revenue was “virtually flat” in 2020 nationwide while 21 states actually saw slight revenue upticks.

Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards noted that while there was a significant downturn in state revenue in the second quarter of 2020, overall it was balanced out by an uptick in the third quarter. “There is no need for more federal aid to the states,” he concluded.

So, the $350 billion in state “aid”—which cost roughly $2,442 per federal taxpayer—Congress  just passed wasn’t actually necessary. What’s the driving motivation behind it, then? This becomes clearer when we consider which states are getting the most taxpayer cash.

Here are the 20 states receiving the most money from the latest spending legislation.

  1. California: $42.3 billion
  2. Texas: $27.3 billion
  3. New York: $23.5 billion
  4. Tribal Governments: $20 billion
  5. Florida: $17.3 billion
  6. Illinois: $13.5 billion
  7. Pennsylvania: $13.5 billion
  8. Ohio: $11 billion
  9. Michigan: $10.1 billion
  10. New Jersey: $10 billion
  11. North Carolina: $8.7 billion
  12. Georgia: $8.17 billion
  13. Massachusetts: $7.96 billion
  14. Arizona: $7.48 billion
  15. Washington: $6.94 billion
  16. Virginia: $6.68 billion
  17. Maryland: $6.21 billion
  18. Tennessee: $6.12 billion
  19. Colorado: $5.9 billion
  20. Indiana: $5.7 billion

At first glance, it’s hard to decipher a clear pattern on this list. It’s not ordered by population, otherwise Florida would be above New York and Georgia would be above New Jersey. So, how did they divvy up the money?

Curiously, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress factored in not just population but also the number of unemployed citizens. This had the direct effect of skewing the bailout benefits toward states that enacted harsher lockdowns and punishing states who prioritized preserving economic activity.

It must be noted that the list is skewed to include more “blue” states that voted for Biden, 13, than “red” states that voted for Trump, 6. It was, in many cases, Republican governors who opted for lighter restrictions and abandoned harsh lockdowns. In states like Florida, this has averted the unemployment and social destruction other states experienced—without producing noticeably worse COVID deaths.

One could argue that perhaps focusing on the unemployment rate is meant to ensure the aid goes to the states shortest on revenue. But why not use actual revenue shortfalls, then? Indeed, California tops the list for bailout money, yet the Golden State is actually running a budget surplus!

The only conclusion left to draw, however disappointing, is that Democrats crafted this bailout’s structure to favor states who pursued the COVID-19 policies they agree with—aka, states run by Democrats. Suffice it to say that political favoritism should never determine how limited taxpayer money is spent.

But, unfortunately, cronyism and favoritism are features, not a bug, of big government spending programs. As economist Ludwig von Mises once explained, big government programs concentrate enormous spending power in the hands of a few political officials; all but ensuring that favoritism follows.

“There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive,” Mises wrote.

It’s simply naïve and ignorant of human nature to expect people—especially the kind of people who become politicians—to dole out trillions of dollars without any hint of favoritism or impropriety. So, while Americans will understandably be angered by the way Congress has carved out hundreds of billions for state governments that don’t need it, they’d be wrong to think this is a one-time mistake.

Corruption and dysfunction are baked into the cake when we entrust the government with vast economic powers.

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

#RetailMadeMe Tik Tok Trend Blames Capitalism For Waste. It Should Blame The Government

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Companies have all kinds of incentives to be charitable. Unfortunately, retailers often face regulations that force them to destroy their merchandise instead of donating it.

Kids say the darndest things, and these days they say them on TikTok, the popular video social media platform with 850 million active monthly users.

A new trend called #RetailMadeMe took off on the platform this month after one popular account asked users to reply with a time their employer forced them to destroy perfectly usable merchandise.

The trend seems to have struck a nerve as hundreds of videos sharing personal accounts began to pour in. Many of the users expressed anger, guilt, and feelings of frustration as they described their own experiences.

Commenters directed their disdain at corporations for such wasteful, selfish, and environmentally negligent practices. Some told of having to destroy clothing that merely needed a good wash or a button sewn on, and pointed out that these items could have been donated to women’s shelters instead of being cut up and wasted.

Many of the replies focused on retail specifically, but another category quickly took off with other users recounting their experience in the food industry. They discussed policies that forced them to throw good food away, even when they themselves were experiencing food insecurity or knew it could be given to those in need.

Notably, many of the responders included additional hashtags with their videos that expressed their scorn for capitalism, which they clearly seem to blame for these egregious practices.

These stories would be upsetting in the best of times. But as lockdowns continue to ravage our economy, and as millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet as a result, it is unsurprising that these anecdotes have ignited a social media wildfire.

But, while the anger behind these videos is understandable, and while it is right to be critical of careless waste, it seems the majority of the social media users in this case haven’t done their homework.

It has become fashionable to blame capitalism for bad behavior and corruption as of late, at least among some demographics. But dig beneath the surface for even five minutes and you will typically find that the source of the problem is actually some government regulation.

Such is largely the case with companies destroying their products instead of choosing to donate them, especially when it comes to food.

“A mix of federal, state and local laws,” wrote Harvard Law professor Jacob Gersen in a 2016 article for Time, “make it almost impossible to get food that would otherwise be wasted to those who could use it. If you donate food to someone and they get sick or even die, then you could be legally liable for their injury. That risk, however small, means that when choosing between giving away and throwing away food, the least risky choice is to toss it.”

Some lawmakers have recognized this problem and passed provisions that limit the liability companies face, but only if they go through a third party charitable organization first. That makes the donation process costly and time-consuming for busy business owners.

Furthermore, a 2014 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless found that 21 cities implemented additional regulations that block food-sharing with the homeless explicitly. One health department even went so far as to dump bleach on perfectly good barbeque (in 2016) when contestants of The American Royal’s World Series of Barbeque attempted to donate excess food from the event.

On top of all of that are other laws, like occupational licensing, that prohibit everyday Americans from sharing excess food they may prepare or possess. Local health laws ban the direct donation of food items, especially if they are prepared in an unlicensed kitchen.

Regulators and government bureaucrats will attempt to say that all of this is done in the name of public safety. But that argument doesn’t wash. In fact, restaurants—which are stringently regulated—are twice as likely to give someone food poisoning compared to meals cooked at home.

Other retailers face similar government regulations that force them to destroy their merchandise instead of donating it.

CVS, which has garnered the particular attention of the #RetailMadeMe trend, responded to the criticism with a statement that expressed as much:

“We work with numerous nonprofit organizations to arrange for damaged or near-expired goods from our stores to be donated to people in need … Our product disposal guidelines and procedures comply with applicable state and federal regulations, and they are consistent with that of the retail industry.”

To be fair, there are other reasons companies choose to destroy goods, and for some of these they deserve criticism. Sometimes the policies are in place so that employees do not have an incentive to damage products (in order to get a reduced price or obtain them for free). And some companies, especially luxury brands like Burberry, destroy their leftover products so as to not decrease the value of their brand on the gray market.

In this regard, pushback from consumers works marvelously and applies pressure on these companies to adopt more sustainable practices. Such is the case with the latter where in response to condemnation, high-end brands like Gucci and Balenciaga have joined initiatives that convert raw materials into yarn for other fabrics and garments.

But more often than not, it is bad government policy that leads to waste—not the free market.

Companies have all kinds of incentives to be charitable. It buys them good (and often free) publicity, builds their brand, and buys them good will. It increases the morale of their employees, and they can usually write off the donations on their taxes.

So contrary to the assertions on Tik Tok, free market capitalism actually provides ample reasons for companies to be philanthropic. It’s time to stop blaming an economic system you don’t understand when the government is actually at fault.

COLUMN BY

Hannah Cox

Hannah Cox is a libertarian-conservative writer, commentator, and activist. She’s a Newsmax Insider and a Contributor to The Washington Examiner.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New Study Pegs COVID-19 Crisis Costs at $16 Trillion—So Far

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The word “lockdown” never appears in the Summers-Cutler study, but the costs are clearly visible.

Estimated costs of the coronavirus pandemic are in. The results are not pretty.

A new study co-authored by Harvard economist David M. Cutler and former World Bank chief economist Lawrence H. Summers places the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic north of $16 trillion.

“The estimated cumulative financial costs of the COVID-19 pandemic related to the lost output and health reduction are shown in the Table,” write Summers and Cutler. “The total cost is estimated at more than $16 trillion, or approximately 90% of the annual gross domestic product of the US.”

As the authors explain, roughly half of the costs stem from the global recession, which was triggered by government-imposed lockdowns around the world. The remainder is the result of economic losses stemming from shorter life spans and health deterioration.

These losses are unprecedented in modern history. According to Summers and Cutler, the costs exponentially exceed previous recessions and recent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

“Output losses of this magnitude are immense. The lost output in the Great Recession was only one-quarter as large,” the authors write. “The economic loss is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the US has fought since September 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.”

It’s a sobering analysis. The numbers are so enormous they are difficult for the human mind to grasp, but they will have very real effects on American families and others around the world.

As the authors point out, the losses translate to about $200,000 for a family of four. These losses will hurt American families, but poor families around the world will be hit even harder. A recent World Bank study estimated that as many as 150 million people around the world will fall into extreme poverty—defined by living on less than $1.90 per day—by 2021.

Cutler and Summers write that “the immense financial loss from COVID-19 suggests a fundamental rethinking of government’s role in pandemic preparation.” They recommend establishing permanent government infrastructure for testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the sick.

This seems, to be kind, misguided. After all, it was the government’s botched response to the pandemic and its proactive role in shutting down society that caused the bulk of the unprecedented economic damage.

It’s important to remember that throughout history humanity has experienced no shortage of pandemics and deadly viruses. Many have noted that the 1957-58 pandemic bears striking similarities to that of 2020. The 1957-58 pandemic claimed the lives of 1.1 million people worldwide (including 116,000 Americans). The case-fatality rate for that pandemic was 0.67, researchers estimate, which is almost certainly higher than that of COVID-19.

Despite the similarities, some of the differences are even more striking. The economic fallout from that pandemic was barely noticeable. (The same can be said of the Spanish Flu of 1918.)

What made the COVID-19 pandemic so unique was not the virus itself, but our collective response to it. In an effort to protect the population from an invisible virus, governments adopted a blueprint for government-enforced social distancing, a plan whose genesis stems from a 14-year-old girl’s science project and a library trip by George W. Bush.

In favor of this approach, the long-standing conventional wisdom of how to mitigate the spread of a deadly virus was abandoned by most nations, and by April dozens of governments around the world had quarantined tens of millions of healthy people and ordered the closure of millions of “non-essential” businesses.

Prior to February 2020, when China ordered the largest mass quarantine in human history, such an action had never been taken. (It’s worth noting that before they became a partisan issue, media organizations such as NPR and the New York Times expressed serious doubts about the strategy of government-imposed quarantines.)

And now we know why: pandemic lockdowns are a strategy born of hubris. The strategy rests on the misguided idea that central planners can create a more perfect social order by removing decision-making from individuals and replacing it with their own top-down mandates.

Economists from Hayek to Mises and beyond have warned that this hubris poses one of the great risks to modern man.

“If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible,” Hayek noted in his Nobel Prize speech.

“The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization…,” he continued.

Central planners failed to heed Hayek’s “knowledge problem” warning. In their zeal to control society, they destroyed the global economy on a scale the modern world had never seen.

Somehow, the word “lockdown” never appears in the Summers-Cutler study.

This will not do. If we cannot acknowledge a basic truth—government lockdowns failed—we are bound to make the same mistake again.

Once we have come to grips with this basic truth— one the World Health Organization and some European nations appear to have gleaned—we can begin to rebuild the economy. And the recipe for success is simple: economic freedom.

“In order to reverse this serious setback to development progress and poverty reduction, countries will need to prepare for a different economy post-COVID, by allowing capital, labor, skills, and innovation to move into new businesses and sectors,” World Bank Group President David Malpass writes.

Free markets and free people is the formula for a brighter future in a post-COVID-19 world.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: WHO Reverses Course, Now Advises Against Use of ‘Punishing’ Lockdowns

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Even as the WHO calls on nations to refrain from imposing lockdowns, many governments continue to use this strategy.

For months, an overwhelming majority of the planet’s population has been subject to cruel and unnerving lockdowns: businesses closed, travel restricted, and social gatherings kept to a minimum.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have sunk our economies, kept loved ones apart, derailed funerals, and made personal and economic liberty a casualty as much as our health. One report states it could cost us $82 trillion globally over the next five years – roughly the same as our yearly global GDP.

Many of these initial lockdowns were justified by policy recommendations by the World Health Organization.

The WHO’s director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, writing in a strategy update in April, called on nations to continue lockdowns until the disease was under control.

But now, more than six months since lockdowns became a favored political tool of global governments, the WHO is calling for their swift end.

Dr. David Nabarro, the WHO’s Special Envoy on COVID-19, told Spectator UK’s Andrew Neil last week that politicians have been wrong in using lockdowns as the “primary control method” to combat COVID-19.

“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” said Nabarro.

Dr. Michael Ryan, Director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, offered a similar sentiment.

“What we want to try to avoid – and sometimes it’s unavoidable and we accept that – but what we want to try and avoid is these massive lockdowns that are so punishing to communities, to society and to everything else,” said Dr. Ryan, speaking at a briefing in Geneva.

RELATED ARTICLE: Income Is Determined by the Scarcity of Your Contribution, Not the Value of Human Worth

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Union Wish List Bill Would Harm Workers and the Economy

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GUESTS AND TOPICS:

TREY KOVACS

Trey Kovacs is a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He has spent the last five years researching the adverse effects of public-sector unions on workplace choice and the economy, worker freedom, private-sector labor relations, and other labor policy reforms. Kovacs has been published by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, U.S. News & World Report, and The Hill, among other publications. His work has been cited by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Fox News and more.

TOPIC..Union Wish List Bill Would Harm Workers and the Economy

JEFF CROUERE

Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and his award winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and at 10:00 p.m. Sundays on PBS affiliate WLAE-TV, Channel 32, and from 7-11 a.m. weekdays on WGSO 990-AM & www.Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author of America’s Last Chance and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on www.JeffCrouere.com.

TOPIC…What San Francisco is Doing is Criminal

JOHN O’CONNOR

John O’Connor, served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Northern California from 1974-1979, representing the United States in both criminal and civil cases. John is also the author of Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.

TOPIC…How the Media Was So Badly Deked on Russiagate

 

Lifestyle Liberalism Takes Money – Lots of It

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Randall Smith: Too many Americans, both “liberals” and “conservatives,” believe America is great because individuals get to choose their own idea of the good.

Many people assume that a society “progressive” in its moral views would naturally be “progressive” in its economy, that someone who believes in a more equal distribution of goods would also be a person who believes in more permissive standards of behavior.

I am not denying the perception, but the reality is often the reverse of what young progressives seem to assume. Those who wish to ensure goals such as a more equitable distribution of the wealth in the economy and a greater respect for the environment are demanding considerable self-discipline of the sort we do not customarily or habitually demand of people in a culture of lifestyle libertinism.

You think it unreasonable to ask a man to discipline his appetite for sex, but then you think it eminently reasonable to require him to relinquish his appetite for money, status, and power?

It’s odd to say, “You needn’t have the discipline to stay faithful to your wife and children,” but then insist that someone should be responsible to all humanity for recycling his plastic containers. If a man can’t discipline his appetites enough to remain faithful to his own children and to the wife to whom he pledged lifelong fidelity before God, what makes anyone imagine he would discipline himself enough to remain faithful to the generations after his death?  It should be no surprise, then, that as societies become more “progressive” morally, they rack up progressively more debts for future generations to pay.

The permissiveness “progressives” support in the realm of personal morals is simply another species of the autonomous individualism they wish to combat in the economic realm. And every weakening of the social bonds of society, especially those developed in the selfless bonds of marriage and family, results in a lessening of the social capital needed to ensure that people remain willing to share plentifully with others without fear of being left indigent themselves.

When people build greater levels of social trust, they are more willing to share. When they fear that even their closest relationships are based on no more than the other person’s pleasure or self-fulfillment, this willingness drains away and people become self-protective.  When this happens, the only way to ensure even minimal forms of cooperation is by means of coercive governmental control.  Is this really desirable?

If you don’t want the government intruding into your private life, would it really surprise you to discover that the guy next door doesn’t want the government intruding into his private business decisions?  If you want to use the coercive powers of government to force a doctor to perform your abortion, would it really surprise you if you found that your landlord was eager to use the coercive powers of government to evict you for not paying your rent?

By the same token, if you insist the government has no business telling you how much to pay your workers and if you want to use the coercive powers of government to favor your business, don’t be surprised if “progressives” resist government intrusion for the things they like and encourage it for the things they don’t.

In a culture in which freedom means primarily freedom from constraint, freedom to do whatever I choose, not freedom to devote myself to the good and the welfare of others, it quickly becomes clear to young people that the freedom they are being “sold” every day by the cultural elites – the freedom of autonomous self-creation, the freedom to create an identity with consumer items, the freedom to pursue what is exciting and to live like the celebrities in the ads – costs money, and lots of it.

The “artsy” life in New York City is expensive.  The McMansion and the expensive prep schools are expensive.  Studies have shown that over a quarter of the people making over $100,000 a year say they are “just barely making it” and cannot afford their basic needs.  Self-creating autonomous freedom costs money; celebrity lifestyles aren’t cheap.

L.A. and New York may be hotbeds of voters for socialist causes, but they are far from being moral exemplars of income equality.  People living in expensive houses and apartments who spend money on bars and clubs, but want the government to “do more for the poor,” have very little credibility.

Move out of the expensive New York City apartment, live in a modest city and simple neighborhood, send your kids to the local public schools or to a modest Catholic school that actually serves the poor, and you might have some “street cred.”  Otherwise, you’re just a poseur.  You cannot say, “You people give up the gross things you enjoy while I keep the sophisticated pleasures I enjoy.”

Lifestyle liberals will never be able to secure social justice if they wear their concern for social justice like the Scribes and Pharisees used to wear their religious garments: as a sign of personal self-righteousness. “They “broaden their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels”; “all their deeds are done for men to see”; when they propose giving to the needy, they sound a trumpet for others to respect them – as self-proclaimed “Pope Francis Catholics” perhaps?

Too many Americans, whether self-proclaimed “liberals” or “conservatives,” believe that what makes America great is that individuals get to choose their own idea of the good, untethered to the claims or needs of others, and then get it – as a right divorced from any obligations to others or to the common good.

Both “laissez-faire conservatives” and “progressives” are called upon to realize that America will only be “great” when we can make our own the prayers of the too-often unsung and unheeded verses of “America the Beautiful”:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

COLUMN BY

Randall Smith

Randall B. Smith is a tenured Full Professor of Theology. His book Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Guidebook for Beginners is available from Emmaus Press. And his book Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture at Paris: Preaching, Prologues, and Biblical Commentary is due out from Cambridge University Press in the fall.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

How lockdown has affected the work-life balance of many families

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Families across the globe have been affected by the ever-changing and uncertain working environment wrought by government responses to Covid-19.  For many families both jobs and childcare have become less certain.

For families that finely balance time with their children, work, childcare and everything else, lockdown periods are highly stressful.  My experience is that many couples with young children work in shifts late in to the night, while balancing phone calls, Zoom meetings and urgent emails during the day.  As most working mothers I know work only part-time, I can only imagine what it might be like with two full-time working parents.

I am certain that more than one parent has wondered whether paid work is sustainable at all in such an uncertain environment, if the children are to also be well-cared for and some remnant of a peaceful and well-functioning home maintained.

A recent study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that government responses to Covid-19 have indeed caused drastic changes to most parents’ work lives and other responsibilities in the United Kingdom.  Its findings include:

  • “Millions of adults have lost or are forecast to lose their jobs permanently; many more have stopped work temporarily. Others are newly working from home, while many key workers are experiencing additional pressures and risks in their work.
  • For most parents, school and childcare closures have meant that children are at home, and requiring care, for at least an extra six hours a day.
  • …The complete shutdown of certain sectors and the huge increase in households’ care responsibilities are both completely new.”  

Job losses and increased childcare responsibilities most often affect women.  Mothers are one-and-a-half times more likely than fathers to have either lost their job or quit since the lockdown began. They are also more likely to have been granted a leave of absence from work.

Women are much more likely to be in insecure, part-time employment roles, and the shut-down sectors also disproportionately employ women, thus they will likely be the first to go when more redundancies hit.  Moreover, as women generally perform important childcare and “home” responsibilities, many feel that without certain child-care, time at home must come before other work.  Thus, the effects of lockdown may be felt for some time to come:

“Workers who have lost their jobs permanently may struggle to find new ones, workers who have reduced their hours may struggle to increase them again, and workers whose productivity has suffered due to interruptions may be penalised in pay and promotion decisions. The disproportionate decrease in mothers’ paid work now suggests any longlasting effects will be particularly severe for them.”

The findings also indicate that, despite doing less childcare than mothers, during lockdown fathers have nearly doubled the time they spend on childcare. It will be interesting to understand how many work places have accommodated fathers to balance childcare responsibilities over the lockdown period.  I have heard more than one parent of pre-school aged children lament that many of the people they work with have never had children or don’t currently have young children, and simply do not seem to even contemplate the huge stress on families with young children.  Will lockdown result in greater allowances for fathers that balance time at the office with adequate family and “home” time?

Spending more time with our own children is a blessing.  I often lament how many hours a day my children are under the influence of others at school; increasing numbers of parents choose to home-school for this very reason.  However, the reality of other commitments, both financial and otherwise, make this season of life a very stressful one for the parents of young children. It may also affect the many women who balanced any sort of paid work with their important work in the home for many years to come.

COLUMN BY

Shannon Roberts

Shannon Roberts is co-editor of MercatorNet’s blog on population issues, Demography is Destiny. While she has a background as a barrister, writing has been a life-long passion and she has contributed… 

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4 Keys to Understanding ‘Defund the Police’ Movement

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“Defund the police” has become the newest rallying cry for the left and it’s no longer confined to radicals and activists.

Some local lawmakers are going a step further to say “dismantle” or “abolish” the police, while left-leaning media outlets are giving credence to the fledgling movement.

The idea could mean different things to different advocates, but at a minimum it means slashing police department resources.

“It’s an extremely irresponsible and reprehensible recommendation specifically for the outcomes that we know would come about in exactly the kind of communities for which these proposal are being made,” Rafael Mangual, deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York, told The Daily Signal.

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Here are four things to know about the “defund the police” movement.

1. Where Is Defunding Happening? 

It’s a near certainty that Minneapolis—where fired police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd—will defund police. (The state upgraded an initial third-degree murder charge.)

The May 25 death of Floyd, captured in a cellphone video showing Chauvin’s knee on his neck for more than eight minutes, has prompted two weeks of civil unrest.

A veto-proof majority of nine members of the Minneapolis City Council announced that they backed getting rid of the city police force—and didn’t even have a plan for what to do next.

“We recognize that we don’t have all the answers about what a police-free future looks like, but our community does,” council members said in a public statement issued over the weekend, the Minneapolis StarTribune reported:

We’re committed to engaging with every willing community member in the City of Minneapolis over the next year to identify what safety looks like for you. …

We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.

The nine council members included President Lisa Bender and Jeremiah Ellison, son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is leading the prosecution of Chauvin and the other three officers.

“This council is going to dismantle this police department,” the younger Ellison said.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey tried to speak to a crowd Sunday, saying at one point, “I do not support the full abolition of the police department.”

The crowd chanted, “Go home, Jacob, go home” and “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

The mayor’s opposition to a “police-free” Minneapolis won’t matter against a veto-proof majority.

The Minneapolis StarTribune reported that in 2019, serious crimes such as robbery, burglary, and assault spiked 13% in the city. Two-thirds of the city’s 81 neighborhoods saw increases, including a downtown area that had a 70% increase.

The nation’s two largest cities are pushing major funding cuts to their police departments, which may not appease activists demanding full-scale abolition. The proposed cuts could spread to more cities.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced major cuts to the, but not abolishing the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Thank you to all who marched for racial justice and equality for Black Americans this weekend,” Garcetti tweeted Monday. “This is a pivotal moment. Here in L.A., we’re starting by identifying $250M, including cuts to LAPD budget, to further invest in communities of color and confront structural racism.”

Of those $250 million in cuts, up to $150 million is expected to come from the police force, the Los Angeles Times reported.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would slash funding for police and shift money to social services in a revised budget proposal. The mayor didn’t provide specifics for the cuts.

The New York City Police Department accounts for $6 billion of de Blasio’s proposed annual budget of $90 billion for the city.

2. What’s Happening in Congress?

Although paying for policing is a local decision, not a federal one, some members of Congress are jumping into the movement without qualification.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., voiced strong support for ditching the Minneapolis police over the weekend.

“When we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise,” Omar told a group of protesters Saturday, adding:

Well, we’ve had a black president, we’ve had a Congressional Black Caucus, we’ve had black mayors, we’ve had black governors, and we’ve had black city council members, we’ve had black police chiefs, yet we are still getting killed, brutalized, surveilled, massly [sic] incarcerated, and we are still having conversations with our children on how to have a conversation with the people that are supposed to protect and serve them so that those people don’t in return kill them.

One of Omar’s colleagues in a small group of House freshmen known as “the squad” said that all elected officials must back the “defund the police” movement.

“This is what political courage is for. Political courage. There are moments in everyone’s careers where you have to be willing to stand up and say, ‘Am I willing to sacrifice all of the privileges I have?’” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said during an online conference with supporters. “If you’re an elected official for any reason that is on this call, I’m asking you to ask yourself what are you willing to sacrifice to make sure that overfunded police departments are defunded.”

House Democrats as a whole are taking a less extreme approach and announced legislation Monday that was crafted by the Congressional Black Caucus.

Among other things, the bill would prohibit discriminatory profiling of any kind, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, mandate dashboard cameras for police vehicles, establish a national police misconduct registry, and make it easier to prosecute officers and sue individual officers.

Asked last week about defunding police, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., deferred to the Congressional Black Caucus.

3. Where Is Public Opinion?

Although loud protesters are demanding defunding, dismantling, or abolishing police across the country, it’s a long way from a majority opinion.

Although some might think from media coverage that much of the Democratic base supports it, only 16% of Democrats in a Yahoo/YouGov poll say they support defunding the police. That’s statistically even with just 15% of Republicans who say they back the idea.

“Despite calls by activists and protesters to defund police departments, most Americans do not support reducing law enforcement budgets,” Yahoo/YouGov said of its poll. “Close to two-thirds (65%) oppose cutting police force funding. Just 16 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans support that idea.”

There is clear evidence of potential consequences from Floyd’s death two weeks ago, the Manhattan Institute’s Mangual said.

“One piece of evidence here to consider is the fact: Is it a coincidence that while police were occupied with violent protests in the city of Chicago, we experienced the most violent weekend of 2020 outside the protests, in the neighborhoods where shootings are a regular occurrence?” Mangual said.

He said he doesn’t think the “defund the police” idea has reached a tipping point to become a serious movement.

Mangual rejected the idea “that we would deprive black and brown communities of police forces who—whether you like them or not—bring about a great deal of peace by intervening in criminal acts and taking criminals off the streets,” adding:

The idea that gang members and repeat offenders ought to be walking the streets because there aren’t any police to take them away is one that is very cavalier with the lives of law-abiding citizens in America’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

4. Is Defunding Police as Bad as It Sounds? 

Defunding police forces seems to mean different things to different advocates.

Some want to reallocate big chunks of police budgets to social programs, which would be more budget cutting than defunding altogether, as in New York and Los Angeles. Others want to end police altogether—as in Minneapolis—and possibly replace police forces with something else entirely.

Even Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, told WBUR in Boston that the goal was about reallocation of funding.

“The demand of defunding law enforcement becomes a central demand in how we actually get real accountability and justice, because it means we are reducing the ability of law enforcement to have resources that harm our communities,” Cullors said, adding:

And with that demand, it’s not just about taking away money from the police, it’s about reinvesting those dollars into black communities. Communities that have been deeply divested from, communities that, some have never felt the impact of having true resources. And so we have to reconsider what we’re resourcing. I’ve been saying we have an economy of punishment over an economy of care.

MPD150, an advocacy group in Minneapolis, where defunding the police force appears all but certain, is in the more radical camp that also calls for other police departments to be defunded.

“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” MPD150 says. “Rather than strangers armed with guns, who very likely do not live in the neighborhoods they’re patrolling, we want to create space for more mental health service providers, social workers, victim/survivor advocates, religious leaders, neighbors and friends—all of the people who really make up the fabric of a community—to look out for one another.”

The Minneapolis organization attempts to acknowledge arguments about violent crime, writing:

Crime isn’t random. Most of the time, it happens when someone has been unable to meet their basic needs through other means. So to really ‘fight crime,’ we don’t need more cops; we need more jobs, more educational opportunities, more arts programs, more community centers, more mental health resources, and more of a say in how our own communities function. …

The history of policing is a history of violence against the marginalized—American police departments were originally created to dominate and criminalize communities of color and poor white workers, a job they continue doing to this day. The list has grown even longer: LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities, activists—so many of us are attacked by cops on a daily basis.

Christy E. Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law and co-director of the school’s Innovative Policing Program, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post advocating defunding.

Lopez argued that the idea is not as scary as it sounds:

Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, ‘defunding the police’ does not mean zeroing-out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight—or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. … Police abolition means reducing, with the vision of eventually eliminating, our reliance on policing to secure our public safety.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Contract With Black America

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

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Trump Showcases Jobs Preserved by Paycheck Protection Program Amid COVID-19 Shutdown

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Michael Heup not only got his job back at Bitty & Beau’s Coffee, which was temporarily closed because of the COVID-19 crisis, but he also had the chance to talk about it at the White House on Tuesday.

“I love my job, and I am excited about going back to work,” Heup, a disabled employee, said at the East Room event. “At Bitty & Beau’s, we like to use the phrase called ‘not broken.’ That means me and all my amazing co-workers are not broken, and we have lots to offer. I know the great country of the United States isn’t broken either.”

The Wilmington, North Carolina-based Bitty & Beau’s Coffee had to temporarily close and lay off 120 employees at the company, most with intellectual and developmental disabilities. But it was able to rehire all the employees after getting a federal loan through the Paycheck Protection Program.

The White House had representatives from eight companies at the event sharing their stories of staying afloat after governments’ COVID-19 mitigation efforts forced much of the economy to close.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Under the program, if businesses with fewer than 500 employees do not lay off employees, the principal on the loan is forgivable. Employers still have to pay the interest.

Bitty & Beau’s Coffee has locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland. For most of the employees, it’s their first paying job. The employees are now “working from home, writing handwritten notes that we include with each online order we ship,” said Amy Wright, CEO of Bitty & Beau’s, also speaking at the event.

“I know everyone is ready to return to normal,” Wright said. “I believe it’s time for a new normal, one where people with disabilities are valued, especially in the workplace. As a recipient of the [Paycheck Protection Program] loan, we will continue to take up the charge and help everyone, especially people with disabilities, pursue the American dream.”

The Paycheck Protection Program has disbursed $350 billion to small businesses across the United States, and more than 1.6 million forgivable loans have been approved by the Small Business Administration. Trump said the SBA has issued more loans in the past 14 days than it has in the past 14 years.

However, the program has come under scrutiny for doling out loans to large employers, such as Harvard University and Shake Shack. Several of the big businesses returned the loans after the rash of bad publicity.

“The press has commented on a lot of big companies that inappropriately took the money,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at the event. “We’ve been very clear. We’ve announced today that any loan over $2 million will have a full review for forgiveness before they are repaid because this is the story of small business here.”

When taking questions from reporters, Trump was asked about Democrats in Congress calling for guaranteed incomes that could go on for months.

“I like payroll tax cuts. I’ve liked that from the beginning. That was a thing that I would really love to see happen. Most economists agree with me,” Trump said.

The president expressed skepticism of bailing out states, but he said aid could come with the precondition of changing sanctuary policies, in which local jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

“We are not looking to recover 25 years of bad management and to give them the money they lost. That’s unfair to other states. Now, if it’s COVID-related, I guess we could talk about it,” Trump said, adding:

But we’d want certain things also, including sanctuary city adjustments, because we have so many people in sanctuary cities, which I don’t even think are popular by radical left folks.

What’s happening is, people are being protected that shouldn’t be protected, and a lot of bad things are happening with sanctuary cities.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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Today’s Americans and Yesteryear’s Americans

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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VIDEO: Bring Back Made in the USA!

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ACT for America is proud to announce our Made in the USA Campaign, dedicated to help bring business back to America and promote others to buy products Made in the USA!

CLICK HERE FOR A LIST OF COMPANIES THAT ARE 100% MADE IN THE USA!

RELATED ARTICLE: Majority in new poll say it’s time to reopen economy for all who are not sick or vulnerable

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