by Robert Bridge, RT:

One symptom of the Covid-19 pandemic, which made redundant millions of ‘non-essential workers,’ is how dependent on taxpayer dollars the American people have become – to the point where 34% of income comes from the government.

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Amid enormous government stimulus spending to offset the ravages of Covid-19, a whopping 34% of US income now comes not from the sweat of one’s brow, but from that bottomless pit known as Uncle Sam’s pockets. According to the latest Personal Income and Outlays data, which provides statistics on government-subsidized income such as stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc., handouts exploded to an astronomic annualized $8.1 trillion. That is double the $4.1 trillion subsidy figure from February, and has allowed President Joe Biden’s administration to boast about a “record surge in personal income and spending.”

As if that cash cow were not bloated enough, the Biden administration is planning to bypass Congress and establish a long-term increase in food aid for tens of millions of Americans.

“A review of the so-called Thrifty Food Plan, ordered by Biden two days after he took office, could trigger an automatic increase in benefits as soon as Oct. 1, a day after expiration of a temporary 15% boost in food stamp payments that Biden included in his $1.9 trillion Covid-relief package,” Bloomberg reported.

Quoting James Ziliak, director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, Bloomberg wrote the increase would amount to “roughly a $136-a-month increase in the maximum benefit for a family of four, which was $680 before the temporary pandemic-related increase.”

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, citing data from the US Census Bureau, “some 18 million adults – 9 percent of all adults in the country – reported that their household sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the last seven days.”

Compare that to the 3.4% of adults who said their household had “not enough to eat” at some point over the full 12 months of 2019. Since it is no secret that millions of Americans are at the breaking point financially amid the pandemic, it is worth wondering what bout of madness caused the Biden administration to open America’s door to illegal migrants from south of the border? But I digress.

At this point, it is also tempting to ask why the US government opted to enact an unprecedented scorched-earth policy with regards to its workforce and economy when confronted by Covid-19. After all, for much of the healthy population under the age of 60, the survival rate from the coronavirus is about 99%. According to research by Hal Jenson, the dean of Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, the unprecedented steps enacted by the US government to offset Covid-19 “have significantly adversely affected hospitals rather than support them, and the overall impact has been to ‘flatten the economy’ rather than just to ‘flatten the curve.’”

Why were millions of American workers, inexplicably and cruelly branded as “non-essential,” forced into economic despair at the very same time that the “essential” big box corporations like Wal-Mart and Amazon bucked the lockdown trend thereby reaping an epic windfall for their billionaire owners? If anything contradicts the “Protestant work ethic” that would be it. Never before in history has a virus brought the US economy to its knees, so it’s very difficult to explain why Covid-19 had so much success on that score.

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