Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) is managing editor of FEE.org.
FILE- This Wednesday, June 6, 2018, file photo shows U.S. currently in New York. When you’re struggling to manage a tiny cry-monster who’s hellbent on making sure you never sleep again, who has time to open the mail or check a credit card statement? Just ask Amy Gentry, an executive assistant to Illinois Emergency Management Agency Director Alicia Tate-Nadeau, who billed the agency more than $1 million since 2020 before abruptly resigning last week.
High-profile scams included a Nigerian crime ring that made off with as much as $850 million through bogus unemployment claims and crafty prison inmates who found a way to fleece the state of Pennsylvania of $200 million through bogus unemployment benefit claims. Less attention has been given to COVID-19 spending abuse and waste. Whether the massive payments to Gentry qualify as corruption is unclear . But few would disagree that paying an executive assistant $60,000 a month is a clear misallocation of taxpayer funds.
There’s a deeper lesson on the opportunity cost of the government’s spending spree. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar taken from someone else, ultimately through taxation, the economist Henry Hazlitt observed. Economics is known as the dismal science in large part because it refuses to ignore the realities of scarcity and opportunity costs. And make no mistake, spending $5 trillion — much of which was digitally printed by the Federal Reserve — comes with enormous opportunity costs.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that lawmakers, during a period of panic, diverted resources from more valuable into less valuable activities, creating mass amounts of waste in the process. If you doubt this, consider that Illinois is still spending vast amounts of COVID-19"emergency" funds on a pandemic Americans have long since moved on from.
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