M.D. Kittle writes for the Federalist about congressional Democrats’ approach to the federal government shutdown.
As Milton Friedman warned us more than 40 years ago, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Imagine what the late, great free market economist would think of the tyranny of the left’s latest political gambit — shutting down the federal government to extend the massive expansion of Obamacare subsidies sold as pandemic relief.
The political hill that Democrats are daily dying on as the shutdown molders into a third week is the preservation of the debt-busting Biden Covid credits, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars more and once again making a mockery of temporary.
In March 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed the so-called America Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the nearly $2 trillion money suck identifying as a “stimulus” package ostensibly to save America from the pandemic. Among many bigger big government initiatives, the boondoggle vastly expanded subsidies in the failed socialist experiment known as Obamacare. The expansion was extended in the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, “supersizing taxpayer payments to insurers,” writes the Foundation for Government Accountability’s Trevor Carlsen and Brian Blase in a pointed policy paper urging Congress to call the time of death on the insanely expensive Biden Covid credits.
How expensive? Taxpayers will be on the hook for an estimated $450 billion if Republicans give in to the Democrats’ hostage demands: reopening the government in exchange for extending the Covid credits beyond its expiration date of Dec. 31.
“The expansion occurred under the argument that we needed to do this because we were in the midst of a pandemic,” Carlsen, Senior Research Fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) and former policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Labor, said in an interview with The Federalist. By the time ARPA passed, many of the state lockdowns were coming down and so-called non-essential businesses were up and running again. By 2022, when majority Democrats voted to extend the Biden Covid credits, the health emergency was well over.
