The last two administrations have dumped $3.5 trillion of supposed Wuhan Virus relief funds into our economy since the virus situation began in early 2020.

Now we’re learning that almost $100 billion of it has been stolen. That doesn’t seem like a large per centage of the total. However, as numbers have a quality all their own, and while those $100 billion are a small per centage of the trillions, they would have had their own use. Fighting the Wuhan Virus’ entry into our nation via our southern border, for instance, by building more of the wall that Biden-Harris has been so desperate to stop. Generating more—many, many more—of the home tests that Biden-Harris has been lying about producing. Plusing up our police forces so as to reduce the rate of crime that Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) insist are no big deal and that other Leftists insist is justified reparations. Plusing up our military. The list goes on.

In the end, this is just one more reason to not use the Federal government to handle, centrally, such handouts. Instead, make block grants to the States.

That won’t stop the graft of this sort, but it at least would divide the money up across the States so that it would be harder to steal, and the governments making the disbursements would be closer to the problem—and to their constituents for accountability.

Better yet would be to tot up the total of all Federal transfers to each State and roll those into block grants—no strings attached—to the States. Then reduce the size of the block grants each subsequent year by 10% of that first year’s block until no more monies are being transferred to the States from Federal coffers.

After all, those monies, the Federal coffers, are the tax monies sent to the Feds by each State’s citizens. Let each State keep those tax funds in the first place, and eliminate the middle man. Each State will use the money more efficiently and more directly for that State’s citizen needs and wants and not for another State’s purposes.

The Federal government should collect, and use, only that which it needs for the only Constitutionally mandated purposes extant: to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. That general Welfare, too, is enumerated in (and limited to) the purposes delineated in the next 16 clauses of Art I, Sect 8; the last clause being not a spending purpose but an authorization for Congress to make specific laws for specific spending.

Gerald Seib had a piece on this in the context of gerrymandering. Along the way, he had these as examples of partisanship:

Yet when the bill [the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill] came to a final vote, six of the state’s [Michigan’s] seven Republicans voted against it. Nor was the phenomenon limited to Republicans. Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib also voted against it, in part because Congress wasn’t also passing a giant social-spending and climate-change package that she and other progressive Democrats have been demanding.

Seib expressed surprise/dismay at those votes, along with the fact that 13 Republicans who did vote for it came in for some opprobrium. Seib apparently missed the part where bill has little to do with actual infrastructure and much to do with “social justice” questions, “green-ness” (just not enough to suit Tlaib). It was a bill worthy of voting against.

Seib also missed here: lawmakers try to perform their most basic tasks: prevent a government shutdown by passing a spending bill, and prevent a national debt crisis by raising the debt ceiling.

Were Congressmen truly concerned about their districts and then our nation ahead of other considerations, they’d produce a Spending Reduction bill, not a spending bill; they’d lower tax rates, which actually increases revenues to Government; and they’d pass a debt ceiling raise large enough only to cover already committed spending, and then only on condition the prior two items also are passed.