Americans are paying a hell of a lot for Joe Biden's spend-a-thon, in the form of inflation, which, at last glance, was costing American workers upwards of $5,000 in extra cash a year.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman used to say, and sure enough, inflation started getting bad when a Democrat Congress passed and Joe Biden signed off on, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which was passed to supposedly help America recover from COVID.

Fox News's Tyler Olson did the job mainstream corporate journalists wouldn't do by checking up on how that was going:

What do an armored SWAT vehicle in Pittsburgh, "restorative justice" educational discipline in New York City, racial healing pop-ups in Minneapolis, and school vape detectors in Montgomery, Ala., have in common? They're all funded by federal taxpayers through the hastily-passed American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Democrats advanced through Congress on a party-line vote in early 2021.

The $1.9 trillion bill was framed as an emergency measure to help the United States dig out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences.

But much money is going toward projects that are seemingly unrelated or barely related to the virus or the recovery from the pandemic. Technically, many such projects are permitted. But it is not how the package was sold.

Fox reported that huge sums of the cash hadn't even been spent yet, but the share that had been went to stuff like this:

Among the spending tenuously related to the pandemic, Minneapolis allocated $300,000 to, "Promote healing and positive activation in the Black community to build and implement a larger vision of an equitable and resilient recovery from COVID-19 and racial trauma. These pop-up style events will help address the need for healing and social cohesion." This is according to a tracker of funding for large cities and counties run by the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. 

It follows from a May 2022 Fox report by Jessica Chasmar pointing out some additional uses that have been employed for this Joe Biden COVID spend-a-thon:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which received $135 million from the plan, announced last October that it had allocated $87.8 million in ARP funds to "nearly 300 cultural and educational institutions to help them recover from the economic impact of the pandemic, retain and rehire workers, and reopen sites, facilities, and programs."

However, many of the institutions were awarded grants for projects that had little to do with addressing recovery efforts from the pandemic, according to research from American Crossroads shared with and verified by Fox News Digital. 

For instance, $499,023 went to the University of Montana for multiple programs on racial justice, including a public lecture series on "racial justice, death and Indigenous knowledge."

Another $50,000 in ARP funds went to a nonprofit organization in the Northern Mariana Islands called 500 Sails for "reopening programs that teach Indigenous canoe-building and explore pre-colonial sea life."

We got canoe-building.  We got vape detection.  We got SWAT tanks, which should come in handy when Joe comes after the Republicans.  We got racial healing pop-ups.

What we don't have is any obvious COVID relief, unless Joe Biden considers making bureaucrats rich the same as COVID relief.  It certainly is relief to them and to the profligate wokester blue cities that are still trying to think up things to spend that COVID relief cash on.

The only thing the American people are getting for this $1.9-trillion spend-a-thon is inflation.  We pay for it not only through the national debt, but through inflation, which is a double-pay hit on taxpayers.

It's part of a grotesque trend seen among Democrats — to pass huge, gargantuan, unheard-of money-spending bills to create money for government that doesn't even have things to spend it on — and calling it something else, some bill that sounds palatable to the public, such as COVID relief, or the one that came after it, the $790-billion "Inflation Reduction Act," which doesn't fix inflation.

That pattern in itself is a textbook definition of inflation, which is to say too much money chasing too few goods — and expecting the public to make no connection.

If these clowns have too much money to spend and not enough to spend it on, such that they are paying for vape-detecting equipment, canoe-building lessons, and racial healing pop-ups because they can't think of anything else to spend it on, then it's time for the incoming Republican Congress to pass some bills requiring them to ship the cash back — and burn it.  That would burn off a lot of the inflation percolating through the system as too much money chases too few goods.

Right now, Biden and Co. are busy blaming anything they can on inflation, when they aren't ignoring the topic, or gaslighting that there is no inflation.  Inflation comes from Big Oil.  It comes from Vlad Putin.  It comes from meat-packing plants.  It comes from Republicans.

It's all garbage.  The inflation is here, and still here, because Joe can't stop spending.  Two more years of this, and the country is bound to go Argentina.

The revelations of how this COVID money is being spent are classic journalistic excellence from Fox News.  It certainly is an example of what I was taught good journalism is at Columbia journalism school back in the 1990s.  It's absolutely classic.  They deserve the Pulitzer Prize for public service for it, which, by coincidence, is dished out at the same j-school.  That won't happen, of course, but now the public has a road map showing just how wasteful and costly Joe Biden's spend-a-thons are to the welfare of the country.  The voters can act.

Image:  Pixabay, Pixabay License.