Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.

Senate Republicans have unveiled their latest coronavirus relief spending bill  — a $1 trillion package that offers much less, to far fewer, than the House Democrats’ $3.5 trillion bill, but still adds more debt to the nation’s balance sheet.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the GOP package:

…will include another round of direct $1,200 payments to many Americans, $100 billion in aid to schools and universities and additional money for coronavirus testing, according to administration officials.

State and local governments would get no additional aid, though the Republican proposal will grant them more flexibility in using existing federal assistance.

There are also items to cap unemployment payments and ban extend a moratorium on evictions.

The immediate question is when the House and Senate might strike a deal. The long-term, uncomfortable question is how all this deficit spending will affect the economy. As Veronique de Rugy writes, the political class may try to use the coronavirus as an excuse for all the spending, but the truth is, they were out of control long before the virus made its first headline:

…before this pandemic – and before the destructive reaction by government officials around the country – we experienced 10 straight years of economic growth, including in wage rates. That should have been the time not only to eliminate or reduce budget deficits but also to implement reforms aimed at ensuring fiscal prudence over the long run. Instead, however, Republicans and Democrats only further opened the government-spending faucet. Massive amounts of additional debt, a ‘gift’ to our grandchildren, were accumulated. And when spending caps got in the way of this spending spree, Congress simply got rid of the caps.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons