On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that Democrats should be the “most upset” about the theft and fraudulent attainment of COVID relief money and questioned why Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) “are seen as the bad guys in their party because they looked at another multi-trillion-dollar spending bill and wondered if our government was up to the task of taking all that money and not just having it siphoned off by grifters” and spent on nonsense.
After discussing theft and fraud with COVID relief money, Maher stated that “nobody, from either party, even pretends to” care about how tax dollars actually get spent.
He later added, “There’s an old adage that government cannot transfer money except by means of a leaky bucket, and I get that. Some amount of leaking is inevitable. But when it’s all holes, it’s not a bucket anymore, what you’ve got there is a handle. A January New York Times article about the effectiveness of the PPP program says, ‘Overall, the PPP was extremely inefficient.’ ‘[O]nly about a quarter of the money spent by the program paid wages that would have otherwise been lost,’ ‘it didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs.’ It ‘was effectively a windfall for business owners — on the whole a wealthy group.’ Okay, shouldn’t liberal Democrats therefore be the ones who are most upset about this? Who do you think is most getting f*cked by all this graft and thievery? If I say, the government, they take our money and waste it, people say, you sound like a conservative. But again, I haven’t changed. The hole-to-bucket ratio, that changed. Should I never notice that change to keep my progressive card? Should I stay supportive of government transfers of money until the percentage that’s stolen is…unlimited? What if they start to shoot money out of a t-shirt cannon, still good? I guess these days these two [Sinema and Manchin] are seen as the bad guys in their party because they looked at another multi-trillion-dollar spending bill and wondered if our government was up to the task of taking all that money and not just having it siphoned off by grifters and for bullshit.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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