We have experienced and witnessed a string of catastrophic government blunders in the past several years.

A partial listing of these blunders by our elected leaders includes:

• The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, intervention in Ukraine with no strategy to win, the introduction of wokeness into the military creating a recruitment crisis, and failure to stand up for Hong Kong
• Deliberately creating a disaster at the border with the importation of millions of illegal migrants, and ignoring the rising death toll from fentanyl
• Pushing “green” energy before it is proven and phasing out energy that is proven before it is time, suppressing drilling and exploration of oil and natural gas creating a shortage hurting all Americans, and selling oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the Chinese Communists
• Double-digit inflation caused by poor fiscal and monetary policy, failure to have a sensible budget and stabilize Social Security and Medicare, failure to properly regulate cryptocurrencies
• Defunding the police and creating a crime wave, cashless bail that releases violent criminals onto the streets in many cities, and failure to enforce the laws fairly without discrimination
• A failure to educate our children with basic skills while propagandizing them with racism and sexual perversion, and responding to legitimate parental complaints by labeling them as domestic terrorists
• Failure to address the baby formula crisis, and an ongoing chip shortage crisis affecting much of America’s manufacturing capability

Whew!  And, this is just a partial list.

The big one was, of course, the response to Covid.  From the decision to “lockdown” came many of our economic woes.

The state and federal governments’ Covid response severely damaged civil liberties by quarantining the healthy rather than the sick, failed to “flatten the curve” in a time frame close to that proposed, ignored normal protocols for the safety and efficacy of vaccines, completely overstated both the effectiveness of vaccines and masks, failed to diligently pursue treatments, distorted the labor markets and the economy in general, and failed to investigate the origins of the virus, regardless of where that investigation would take us. 

On the educational front, the most recent  The Economist simply says “Covid learning loss has been a global disaster” and that new data shows it “far worse than anyone expected.”

In addition, there has been a failure to investigate conflicts of interest among federal health officials and their financial ties to government-regulated pharmaceutical companies.

One of the “bipartisan” measures touted by both parties was the Paycheck Protection Program or PPP.

You might remember these were non-collateralized loans, with no recourse, extended to small businesses (fewer than 500 employees) to offset the effect of the “lockdown.” In a sense, it was justified because it was the government that was putting companies out of business and creating huge layoffs.

For a government program, it was developed and executed quite rapidly, barely three weeks after the emergency for the Wuhan virus was declared.

Initiated under Trump in March of 2020, most of the “loans” were forgiven by Biden by June 2022.

This and other handout programs drastically increased money in circulation. Unlike Quantitative Easing which bolstered banks’ reserves (which stayed mostly within the banking system), this and other programs just handed out newly created money to the public in general. This is largely responsible for the inflation crisis and acculturating the public to expect direct payments from the government.

Moreover, the program itself was grotesquely inefficient. A new study has found that while it did save some jobs (jobs that would not have needed saving if the government had not adopted lockdown), it did so with great waste.

A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis finds that it cost between $169,000 to $258,000 to save a job that averages $58,200.

The authors of the study concluded it cost taxpayers about $4 for every $1 in “saved” jobs.

Besides this miserable outcome, the study found that 72% of PPP funds went to households in the top 20% of income. In short, it was a massive handout to the rich and affluent. This simply exacerbated further the problem of income inequality.

Well, you could say, this is what happens in emergencies. But it was the government (mostly public health officials) that created the emergency. Further, it appears that government-funded programs gave birth to the virus itself!

Covid deaths were concentrated among the very elderly and those with co-morbidities, often two or more. There has never been any real threat to the great majority of workers or small businesses.

Even if there was a threat to the general population, you have to wonder if government SBA loans and bolstering the use of unemployment insurance would not have been a less wasteful way to handle the problem. Spending $4 to save $1 makes little sense.

Moreover, many small businesses “saved” are never coming back. It has been estimated that some 60% of businesses that were closed during lockdown are not coming back.

It was a monumental waste and failed in the end to save a huge swath of small businesses.

This is the downside to the “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality of those of both political parties in Washington, DC.

Often programs are ill-conceived, wasteful, set terrible precedent, and are difficult to repeal.

About the only good thing about this program that can be said, is that it ended in fairly short order.

This raises a very interesting macro question: given the string of errors made by our government leaders and corporate elites, why does a large segment of the population still insist that government programs, using compulsion and public money, are the way to solve complex problems?