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Here, have $1200. Oh yeah, it comes with $7000 in debt.

Regular people: You can take 12 of these, but not more!
Rich corporations: Take as many as you want!
// photo by John Guccione

It was an emergency. They had to do something! Now! It was so urgent they didn't even want to vote for it! The biggest spending bill in history. Until Thomas Massie heroically interjected and forced a vote in Washington, pointing at some obscure document called the US Constitution. He faced instant backlash from the Democrats (no surprise here), Republicans (fiscal conservatives. lol!), and Donald Trump (election year, rev up the printing press!).

Massie really pissed off his colleagues:




Whoa! So salty, these people. How dare Massie ask the government follow the Constitution and demand a vote on spending $2.2 trillion! I mean, is the Constitution even a real thing? It's not like politicians swore to uphold the Constitution or anything, right? I get it with Trump, I think he really doesn't understand or has any interest in keeping up the charade, but most politicians usually try to show some semblance of following the law.

Unfortunately for Massie's opponents, the more that is revealed about the stimulus, the more idiotic it seems to be. If their goal really was to help people, that is.

Everybody likes the $1200 check they get from the government and they've already started showing up in the mail. Woohoo! If you're in San Francisco, that will pay for...one and a half weeks worth of rent. Yay?

But has any of the recipients done the math on this? $1200 x 328 million people = $394.6 billion. Wait, the stimulus bill was...$2.2 trillion? So this means every person is on the hook for $2.2 trillion / 328 million people = $7000 per person. So where did the other $1.8 trillion go?

Corporations!!! That's right. Once again, the government is making regular people bail out Wall Street.

Yes, most of the money went to corporations. Boeing lobbied for $60 billion. Yeah, the beleaguered company that built the 737 MAX which killed 346 people. Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Boeing wins the stimulus bill sweepstakes!

Okay, so some of the money, about $300 plus billion went to "small businesses". But the government screwed that up, too. The money dried up in short order and most of the money went to publicly traded companies anyway since the way they distributed the money incentivized the banks to give to their larger accounts. Plus, the strings attached were that the smaller businesses couldn't fire or lay anyone off while the large corporations had no such strings attached.

Here's a thought. Maybe the companies that need capital can issue new shares to fundraise. Yeah, it'll make their stock go down, but that's what investors are for, right? To inject money or dilute their shares when the company they own needs money to survive. Investors are owners. Act like it. Why are we taxing grandma and the single mother struggling to survive (either with direct taxation or by inflation) to keep these multi billion dollar companies afloat? Once again, the government props up millionaires and billionaires while keeping the poor and middle class down by dangling a paltry $1200 carrot to keep them placated. Privatizing profits and socializing losses is what the government continues to do, money continues to be funneled from the poor and middle class to the rich, and if you continue to vote for Democrats and Republicans, you're enabling this to happen.

So Mike Turner, John Kerry, Donald Trump, and Ruben Gallego all pushed forward a bill to pile money on rich corporations at the expense of the people while ripping into people trying to prevent people like Turner, Kerry, Trump, and Gallego from screwing people over. Turns out Thomas Massie is the hero and his detractors the villains.
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