COVID-19 Stimulus Bill – Wordy, Wasteful, & Dishonest

The latest stimulus bill passed to provide monetary aid to people as a result of the impoverishment resulting from all the sudden economic shutdowns of commerce because of COVID-19 pandemic is H.R. 133, titled the “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021”. Not only is there no authority in the U.S. Constitution to disburse any sort of stimulus funds, not only does government doing so violate liberty as taxes are imposed to force people to have their income, their private property, stolen in order to fund the stimulus, and not only does it fail to fix the heart of the economic problems, stifled supplies of tangible goods and services directly resulting from the above-described shutdowns, H.R. 133 is way too wordy and gives out money to completely undeserving recipients. Each concern will be broken down in the following points:

-With a 5,600 page-length, there is no way that any member of Congress or the U.S. Senate read the whole bill before voting on it. As Senator Mike Lee of Utah comments here, Congress and the Senate only had one day to read and vote on this behemoth of a bill. There is no way anybody read the entire length of the bill before voting in favor of it. It’d be a grand surprise if anybody even read the bill at all! This begs the question; who wrote this abomination, which is euphemistically referred to as a stimulus aid? This bill is longer than the Bible, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, by several thousand pages! First of all, members of Congress and the Senate should read every bill before they vote on it. As elected officials, representatives of the people, and defenders of liberty and sworn protectors of the U.S. Constitution, every member of Congress and Senate is absolutely obligated to read every bill before signing onto the bill. This same issue has happened repeatedly over time, such as with Obamacare, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, though thankfully the latter was scrapped under President Donald Trump, who sadly will sign this bill into law. Failing to read the bill before voting on it is purely irresponsible, inappropriate behavior for elected official, and contributes to the ultimate downfall of civilization. Would you ever sign a contract, receipt, or written agreement without reading it first?! Hopefully not, but it is one thing to commit such folly in one’s personal life, where voters and taxpayers are not affected, disrespected, and abused. When it comes to elected officials voting on bills and legislation, such follies are totally unacceptable, as hapless taxpayers are unjustly victimized by such irresponsibility. One thing this author therefore proposes is that before voting in favor of any bill, members of Congress and Senate should read the entire bill out loud in a public venue where the citizens can hear and verify that their elected officials have actually read the bills PRIOR to voting in favor of them. Some may argue against it by saying, well then no new legislation will pass as elected officials rarely ever read the bills they sign. This is a good thing; the fewer new laws that get passed, the better. Rather than signing into law new legislation that almost always tends to violate liberty, our elected officials should be focusing their efforts on undoing legislation on the books that fails to protect liberty. Our civilization needs fewer laws, not more, in order to ensure that the laws on the books fulfill their proper and sole purpose. This proposal would also push lawmakers to refrain themselves from proposing and pushing legislation that is too wordy – this is long overdue. In fact, no newly proposed legislation should be wordier than any amendments of the U.S. Constitution, especially if the latter is truly the supreme law of the land.

-Another troubling aspect of H.R. 133 is that it gives illegal aliens $1,800, but only $600 for U.S. Citizens, as explained here. Wow, so much for representing the American people! This might sound heartless, but it is actually more heartless to be giving illegal aliens any money, let alone thrice as much as that given to U.S. Citizens. Of course, the principles of liberty don’t warrant anybody to receive stimulus, nor do they allow or warrant the government to be disbursing any such stimulus. The point remains that this type of government stimulus is totally heartless and unacceptable. Would anybody really argue that a U.S. Citizen can justifiably violate the immigration laws of another country(the way immigrants are allowed to do in the U.S.) and then become entitled to stimulus payments paid for by taxpayers of the other country?

-The last point that this post will tackle is that out of the $2.3 trillion total dollars included in the bill, only $900 billion goes to U.S. residents(including citizens and immigrants, both legal and illegal). That’s right, only a minority of the total funds actually goes to the United States. Where does the rest go? Foreign countries! As described in more elaborate detail here, U.S. taxpayers, through H.R. 133, will be forced to pay for ship refurbishments in Sri Lanka and “Gender Programs” in Pakistan, whatever the latter means; perhaps it should be the inspiration for the revival of the horror movie genre, among many other foreign abominations.

But don’t worry, Americans will get all their stimulus Christmas gifts, we’ll continue to be oppressed and told to continue impoverishing and saddening ourselves through more ineffective lockdowns, and everything will be just fine and dandy, right??!!