The media’s focus on waste misses key context, and ignores the stunning success of the lockdown-era welfare state.
Congress’s response to the COVID-19 economic downturn was the greatest success story of domestic economic policy in our lifetimes. Even as millions couldn’t work, poverty fell to its lowest level since 1967 thanks to three stimulus bills geared toward helping workers first. Millions earned more from unemployment insurance than their minimum-wage jobs, and for perhaps the first time ever, they had the time and opportunity to trade up into better-paying, more fulfilling work. Americans got a brief glimpse of what a better, kinder economy might look like.