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Let’s just call it what it is, right up front: blatant wealth redistribution — the cornerstone objective of the Democrat Party. They know it, they know we know it, and they know we know they know we know it.
Moreover, everything the Democrats support or oppose can be connected to the ballot box with no more than two dots. Toss in a depth of hypocrisy that knows no bounds and a willingness to lie without impunity, and there you have it — Joe Biden’s Democrat Party. Today’s example is quintessential.
As reported by The Center Square Staff on John Solomon’s Just the News, Democrat-run cities across America are now using U.S. taxpayer-funded COVID “Relief” Funds to fund so-called guaranteed income programs, no strings attached, to dole out $1,000-a-month stipends to “qualified” applicants. If this scam doesn’t define socialist George Bernard Shaw’s “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul” admonition, what does?
Quite simply, we have modern-day Robin Hood robbing hardworking taxpayers and giving their money to those who didn’t earn it. While it might sound magnanimous and “the right thing to do” to many of our left-wing friends, as the late UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: “The problem with socialism is sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”
Here’s a bit of background, via Just the News:
About 180,000 people applied for the Los Angeles County guaranteed-income program in the spring of 2022. But there were just 1,000 spots available.
It was a sign of high demand for the $1,000-a-month no-strings-attached stipend from the government.
New guaranteed income programs are popping up across the country as governments are using the stockpile of federal COVID-19 emergency money to fund them.
Mayors For A Guaranteed Income is a collection of mayors from some of the largest cities in the country orchestrating the long-term development of guaranteed income plans.
The city of St. Louis approved spending $5 million of its federal COVID-19 recovery money on Dec. 13 to pay for its guaranteed income program that will give 440 households $500 a month for 18 months.
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To reiterate, as JTN noted, guaranteed income (universal basic income) wealth redistribution scams are continuing to pop up across America. So what’s the problem? Other than principle, sooner or later, federally-provided (taxpayer-funded) COVID piggybanks are going to be empty. Then what?
What happens to these Democrat projects once the one-time federal emergency funds in response to the pandemic dry up? Kyle Wingfield, CEO of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, told JTN:
It seems highly unlikely that these programs could be funded absent either a dramatic shift in funding from existing anti-poverty programs or a huge, permanent increase in federal spending.
A shift is pretty improbable in the current political climate. Given that Congress is already borrowing at a large scale to pay for other programs, this increase would lead to more federal taxpayer debt.
Bingo — which means an increase in federal spending that would lead to even more federal taxpayer debt, increased taxes, or both — along with likely increases in affected state and local taxes.
Veronique de Rugy, the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy at the Mercatus Center, also says states would likely have to help fund these programs moving forward, as federal money begins to run out:
When the money is gone, state budgets will have to pick up the tab. I assume that when COVID money is gone, some states will give up the programs while others will keep them going.
As Democrats continue to claim that their massive spending boondoggles, generally stuffed with billions of dollars in gratuitous earmarks, aren’t wealth-distribution scams, of course, they are. Sixty years of history have shown us that more than enough people will gladly accept handouts, while more than enough Democrat lawmakers are more than happy to spend our money on their politically-expedient programs.
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