This is what we get for waiting months and months for Capitol Hill knuckleheads to respond in real time to a pandemic that has wreaked economic havoc on the nation.
Government reacts to straightforward, elegantly simple moves the way a vampire reacts to garlic.
What Pelosi, Mcconnell et al have come up with is 5,593 pages long.
Here are the provisions dealing with what the damn thing is supposed to deal with:
The bill contains $600 stimulus checks for most Americans with another $600 per child, a $300 weekly unemployment supplement and $284.4 billion in forgivable small-business Paycheck Protection Program loans.
The stimulus checks are means-tested, with people earning more than $75,000 — or $150,000 per married couple filing jointly — getting less money, and people earning over $95,000 getting nothing.
It could have been considerably shorter and less expensive had they not included funds for a museum to offer programming about women, a section dealing with administering painkillers to race horses, "gender programs" in Pakistan, assistance for Tibetan refugees, new penalties for unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, creating a commission that will educated consumers about proper storage of fuels, and $440 million for the operation, maintenance and security of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Now, the two most recent posts here at LITD have had to do with how the Democrats are once again, with renewed vigor, putting climate stuff front and center among their areas of policy focus.
That crud shows up in this behemoth plenteously:
Chief among some of the massive bits of hot garbage that are completely unrelated to the pandemic were a raft of provisions dealing with climate change. Yes… I know. The Associated Press highlights some of these new laws that were never mentioned in public while the bill was being negotiated but were somehow crammed down everyone’s throats in the interest of looking like they were doing something about pandemic relief.
The energy and climate provisions, supported by lawmakers from both parties, were hailed as the most significant climate change law in at least a decade.
“Republicans and Democrats are working together to protect the environment through innovation,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“This historic agreement includes three separate pieces of legislation that will significantly reduce greenhouse gases,″ Barrasso said, citing measures that promote technologies to “capture” and store carbon dioxide produced by power and manufacturing plants; reduce diesel emissions in buses and other vehicles; and authorize a 15-year reduction of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, that are used in everything from cars to air conditioners. HFCs are considered a major driver of global warming and are being targeted worldwide.
You’re going to see the phrases “promoting technologies” and “creating jobs” quite often in that portion of the bill. The technologies in question involve carbon capture, emission reduction and replacements for the hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used as coolants in air conditioning and refrigeration systems, among other things.
You see, that’s how they like to describe such “initiatives” to put a pleasant spin on them. A better translation of those passages would be to say that taxpayer money will be shoveled into “green energy” and carbon reduction companies who will ostensibly be working to achieve those goals while (just coincidentally) making a ton of money for a small number of people. A closer look into how those people donate to political campaigns and focus their job creation on the states represented by the politicians pushing these plans will no doubt be very instructive.
Cynical wisecracks about Congress being ineffectual and out of touch go back to Mark Twain. It was a staple of Will Rogers's material.
But this strikes me as a new level of absence of seriousness. At a juncture like our present one in post-America, is it really that difficult for our national legislators to filter out concerns other than the public-health crisis gripping the nation and address it?
Both of the elected branches of our federal government are complete embarrassments.
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