Politicians and bureaucrats are (self-interested) conduits for taking money from one group of people and giving it to another group of people.
Milton Friedman famously explained that this is why they largely don’t care about how much money is spent or how effectively it is spent.
No wonder government programs, agencies, and departments waste so much money, year after year, decade after decade.
This observation about careless profligacy also applies to so-called emergency spending.
I’ve repeatedly written about the perverse impact of unemployment benefits that are so excessive that people have big incentives not to work.
But that’s just one problem with that program. Axios has a depressing report on how the turbo-charged benefits that were part of the coronavirus legislation triggered staggering levels of fraud.
www.aier.org/article/pandemic-emergency-spending-riddled-with-fraud/