Covid generosity

The government was so generous with such things as stimulus funds during the pandemic. Actually, they weren't. Quite frankly, I'm sick of the narrative that the government spending other people's money is generous. If they were truly generous, politicians would have contributed their own money to help the public.

There are multiple ways for our government to tax citizens. The most obvious is direct taxation such as income tax. There are other options available such as printing money. Printing money leads to inflation. Inflation is essentially a tax on everyone.

Another popular option is deficit spending. The idea behind deficit spending is that the government can take on debt which will have to be repaid in the future. This likely requires tax increases in the future. With how the government handles its budget, most of the cost associated with debt will likely be the responsibility of future generations. This could be the ultimate form of taxation without representation since people who have not been born can't possibly fight back.

Generosity is not about how much taxpayer money you can redistribute. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, stimulus spending was a relatively minor portion of government spending. Some of our government's supposed generosity consisted of giving taxpayer money to government entities. That's hardly a legitimate act of generosity.

The bottom line is that the money the government spent during the pandemic wasn't theirs to begin with. They took money from taxpaying citizens. Then, they redistributed those funds. A fraction of the money they took was given back to citizens in the form of stimulus. The government ended up taking more money from citizens than they gave back. By no stretch of the imagination should this qualify as generous.