Fresh off their holiday break, federal lawmakers are beginning to discuss new pandemic stimulus spending. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D‑MD) said the Biden administration was “preparing to ask Congress for ‘substantial’ funding to address the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic domestically and abroad.”
Hoyer expected the new funding would focus on “testing, vaccines” and “to make sure schools have resources to keep themselves safe.”
If all that sounds familiar, it should, as lawmakers previously allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to these same purposes. Investigators last fall started asking where did all the pandemic money go? Fair question.
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Senators Roy Blunt (R‑MO) and Richard Burr (R‑NC) just asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for a breakdown of $266 billion in pandemic education funds, highlighting that $191 billion remained unspent. The same goes for COVID testing.
As a recent oped noted, “the country has run short of COVID tests even though some $79 billion – more than the entire GDP of Kenya – was allocated to developing and distributing such tests. Tests, it must be said, that candidate Joe Biden put at the heart of his promise to ‘shut down the virus’ in 2020.”
But these already provided funds are not the only things politicians with big new spending plans have forgotten about in recent months. For instance, Democrats have argued for months that their trillion-dollar Build Back Better plan was needed to prevent the expiration of temporaril …
New York Congresswoman Claudia Tenney discusses how Democrats are fighting for ‘raw power’ with voting legislation. EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Rand Paul, R‑Ky., released a new report Tuesday on the troubling effects of inflation on low and middle-income families as well as small businesses. Paul, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, blames the 7% spike in consumer prices – a 40-year high – on excessive coronavirus relief spending by Congress, and warns the rising prices are “only going to get worse.“INFLATION SURGES 7% IN DECEMBER, HIGHEST RATE IN 40 YEARS“In recent months, prices on nearly everything from gas, food, and clothes to electricity, car prices, and rent, have all increased, and unfortunately it’s only going to get worse,” Paul said in a statement released first to Fox News Digital. “Congress needs to realize that further spending at this time of rapidly rising prices is only going to continue the trend of rising prices on this nation’s already vulnerable businesses and families.” Sen. Rand Paul questions Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing. (Pool/Sipa)Paul’s 18-page report is called “The Hidden Tax” and it shines a spotlight on how prices on everyday essential goods have shot up in the last year, citing publicly available price index studies. Paul also cites public opinion studies, such as Gallup, that found households making $40,000 or less are under the most hardship by the rising costs, whereas households earning at least $100,00 …
www.foxbusiness.com/politics/rand-paul-report-rising-inflation