How the Democrats used Covid to create inflation and wasted money

 Monica Showalter:

Americans are paying a hell of a lot for Joe Biden's spend-a-thon, in the form of inflation, which, at last glance, was costing American workers upwards of $5,000 in extra cash a year.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman used to say, and sure enough, inflation started getting bad when a Democrat Congress passed and Joe Biden signed off on, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which was passed to supposedly help America recover from COVID.

Fox News's Tyler Olson did the job mainstream corporate journalists wouldn't do by checking up on how that was going:

What do an armored SWAT vehicle in Pittsburgh, "restorative justice" educational discipline in New York City, racial healing pop-ups in Minneapolis, and school vape detectors in Montgomery, Ala., have in common? They're all funded by federal taxpayers through the hastily-passed American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Democrats advanced through Congress on a party-line vote in early 2021.

The $1.9 trillion bill was framed as an emergency measure to help the United States dig out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences.

But much money is going toward projects that are seemingly unrelated or barely related to the virus or the recovery from the pandemic. Technically, many such projects are permitted. But it is not how the package was sold.

Fox reported that huge sums of the cash hadn't even been spent yet, but the share that had been went to stuff like this:

Among the spending tenuously related to the pandemic, Minneapolis allocated $300,000 to, "Promote healing and positive activation in the Black community to build and implement a larger vision of an equitable and resilient recovery from COVID-19 and racial trauma. These pop-up style events will help address the need for healing and social cohesion." This is according to a tracker of funding for large cities and counties run by the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. 

It follows from a May 2022 Fox report by Jessica Chasmar pointing out some additional uses that have been employed for this Joe Biden COVID spend-a-thon:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which received $135 million from the plan, announced last October that it had allocated $87.8 million in ARP funds to "nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions to help them recover from the economic impact of the pandemic, retain and rehire workers, and reopen sites, facilities, and programs."

However, many of the institutions were awarded grants for projects that had little to do with addressing recovery efforts from the pandemic, according to research from American Crossroads shared with and verified by Fox News Digital. 

For instance, $499,023 went to the University of Montana for multiple programs on racial justice, including a public lecture series on "racial justice, death and Indigenous knowledge."

Another $50,000 in ARP funds went to a nonprofit organization in the Northern Mariana Islands called 500 Sails for "reopening programs that teach Indigenous canoe-building and explore pre-colonial sea life."

We got canoe-building.  We got vape detection.  We got SWAT tanks, which should come in handy when Joe comes after the Republicans.  We got racial healing pop-ups.

...

Covid became a convenient excuse for Democrats to spend money on their pet projects that had zero to do with the pandemic.  It is an example of how they saddle the taxpayers with unnecessary spending and debt.