Valley Voices: Congress should focus on reopening schools and businesses, not on $1.9 trillion of pork
Congress is currently in the midst of passing one of the largest spending packages in our nation’s history.
The $1.9 trillion (that is $1,900,000,000,000) legislation has been billed as emergency aid to help our nation respond to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, even as states across the country begin to lift lockdown restrictions and the Congressional Budget Office’s Economic Outlook projects that by the middle of this year, the economy will have returned to a pre-pandemic level of real GDP even without any additional stimulus spending. But unfortunately, less than 10% of this funding will actually go to fighting the coronavirus. At the same time, nearly $1 trillion previously allocated for COVID-19 relief remains unspent — that’s 1 in every 4 dollars allocated to date.