Stimulated to Death (Updated with more stimulation)

The United States Senate just passed [I have spoken too quickly! — see below] a “stimulus package,” supposedly in response to the economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. This stimulus package — what a fabulously Orwellian term for such a bill — involves roughly two trillion dollars in government redistribution.

Just to be clear about the meaning of that number:

• Two trillion dollars is more — a few hundred billion dollars more — than all the physical cash currently in circulation in the U.S. economy.
• Two trillion dollars is much more than half of the U.S. Federal Government’s entire tax revenue for 2019.
• Two trillion dollars is roughly double the 2019 federal deficit — a deficit that was incurred without any such stimulus spending, and in a relatively strong economic year, meaning a high tax revenue year.

Let’s clarify the situation you are witnessing (assuming you are not hiding your head under a pillow, as you probably should be) just a little further: The U.S. Federal Government is responding preemptively to an economic “crisis” that has not yet proved to be particularly crisis-like — it is less than two weeks old, after all — except in public perception, which perception the government itself has played a large role in fostering.

In other words, the government has manufactured a crisis, or a prospective crisis, and is now “responding” to that manufactured crisis by stealing two trillion dollars from the American people, or rather from their children, in order to ameliorate economic hardships which, if they do in fact occur, will have been largely the direct result of the government’s unwillingness to stand up for common sense, the rule of law, and the principle of liberty when it counted, i.e., when the corporate media was doing everything in its power to make blood money from the American people by fomenting mass panic over a virus that has shown itself to be far less catastrophic than some had initially feared.

What is being stimulated by this stimulus package, then, is mostly the following:

• The artificially-induced perception of a dire emergency;
• The sense that a normal social problem, such as a new virus, requires and warrants massive and “unprecedented” government intervention;
• The ever-expanding national debt, which entraps Americans forever on the steep mountain of confiscatory taxation, in a Sisyphean climb to the unreachable goal of solvency;
• Metastasizing government paternalism.

It’s classic progressivism: Government creates a problem, or makes a small one exponentially worse; government then insists that the only way to correct this growing problem is by enlarging the government; and the new powers and expenses created by this alleged government solution — which will prove, after the fact, to have solved nothing — will become entrenched in the national budget and psyche in perpetuity.

And now, boys and girls, you understand why Mitch McConnell and the Washington establishment supported Donald Trump in 2016.

Update:

It turns out that there may be a few snags in the passage of this Hyperbolic U.S. Bankruptcy Bill. It seems that some Republicans are concerned that some Democrat pet projects will be inserted into the “stimulus,” whereas some Democrats are concerned that Republican pet corporations have been given special perks.

Guess what! They’re both right — and both using their accusations to whitewash the entirety of the stimulus package itself, which is nothing but payoffs to various entities, including and especially the American people as a whole, intended to put a smiley paternalistic face on this moment of runaway tyranny.