COVID-19 stimulus spending would have funded 16.6 million middle class children from age 0 to 18
Today’s inflation news… “It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child” (Wall Street Journal):
The cost of raising a child through high school has risen to more than $300,000 because of inflation that is running close to a four-decade high, according to a Brookings Institution estimate.
It determined that a married, middle-income couple with two children would spend $310,605—or an average of $18,271 a year—to raise their younger child born in 2015 through age 17. The calculation uses an earlier government estimate as a baseline, with adjustments for inflation trends.
Let’s combine that with “Where $5 Trillion in Pandemic Stimulus Money Went” (Pravda, May 11):
Stimulus bills approved by Congress beginning in 2020 unleashed the largest flood of federal money into the United States economy in recorded history. Roughly $5 trillion went to households, mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, local governments, schools and other institutions around the country grappling with the blow inflicted by Covid-19.
Even at today’s inflated costs, therefore, if we hadn’t decided to spend all of our current and future savings on coronapanic we could have fully funded 16.6 million children in middle class families, a group that doesn’t tend to have children. This chart from 2019 shows that low-income Americans, who get taxpayer-funded housing sized for whatever families they choose to create, and high-income Americans, who are rich enough to buy family-sized houses, are the ones that have kids:
That’s considering only direct federal spending. Can we guess that at least another $5 trillion was spent and/or sacrificed via state governors’ lockdown orders? Now we’re up to being able to fund 33+ million middle class kids. There are only about 70 million children at all income levels in the U.S. right now. Roughly half of school kids are poor enough to get free or reduced-price lunch (NCES) and, therefore, presumably are entitled to other programs that used to be called “welfare”. So the coronapanic spending, at both state and federal levels, would have been enough to fund 100 percent of American children, for their entire childhood, whose childhoods are not already being funded by taxpayers.
Related:
- “Scandal-hit Hunter Biden ‘agreed to pay baby mama $2.5 million” (The Sun, October 2020) shows that the stripper-turned-family-court-plaintiff, even if she failed to invest the $2.5 million in an inflation-protecting manner, will still get a $2.2 million profit off Joe Biden’s granddaughter (when will this kid be invited to the White House? Grandpa is not getting any younger or more energetic!)
- “Prosecutors Struggle to Catch Up to a Tidal Wave of Pandemic Fraud” (NYT): “… one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people … In one instance, 29 states paid unemployment benefits to the same person. … Another individual got 10 loans for 10 nonexistent bathroom-renovation businesses, using the email address of a burrito shop.”
