Ben Shapiro: Relief checks are not necessary because the pandemic is over
Shapiro also complains that money won't help people escape poverty and that the legislation will lead to “kids out of wedlock”
Published
Citation From the March 11, 2021, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): OK, this is very consequential legislation. It sets up brand new entitlement programs that quote, unquote only last a year but are designed to last far longer.
It creates, essentially, incentives, the old welfare incentives, to have kids out of wedlock because, again, you get paid by the government to have kids. Not only do you get paid by the government to have kids, there are no restrictions with regard to having a job or not having a job. There are no work requirements. There's nothing that encourages marriage anywhere in there. Not only that, again, this is a giant bailout for states that have blown out their own pocketbooks. It is a bonanza used car sales lemon. That's all this thing is. Here's Nancy Pelosi calling it the most consequential legislation of our lifetime.
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SHAPIRO: By the way, help should've been on the way in, I don't know, August. OK, the reality is there were COVID relief packages passed all the way up -- in a bipartisan fashion during the Trump administration.
This thing was passed along pure party lines. Why? Because the pandemic is basically over, ok? The pandemic is done. Ok, now we're spending $1.9 trillion, more money than has ever been seen by God or man, spending money that has not yet been created, we are spending all of that money to do what? To do what? We are now actively encouraging people not to go back to work. We are providing enhanced unemployment incentives that go all of the way to September. September. Are you insane? September?
Again, we have the lowest rates of infection since the beginning of the pandemic. I would say at this point, most states are wide open for business. The unemployment rate in places that have remained open, like South Dakota, is like 3%. By the way, the national unemployment rate is 6.3%. Which is not wonderful but it's certainly not crisis level. We're not talking about the 20% that we were at even a few months ago. Now is the time we need to spend $1.9 trillion on a bunch of nonsense?
Now, naturally, this is popular. If you send people checks, that's popular. But over time it's going to be shown is that it doesn't actually raise people out of poverty to just send them checks. That has never been a solution. The war on poverty tried this with $22 trillion dollars worth of checks over the past several decades. It has not lowered the poverty rate in the United States. You can't just sign people checks and then hope that's going to cure poverty. That is not how poverty gets cured.
There are steps to escape poverty, but those steps, generally speaking, are reliant on individual decision-making, like don't have kids out of wedlock, finish high school and get a job. By the way, if you follow those steps, you will not spend your life in poverty.