"Are we not often told that anyone needing food stamps or unemployment aid is just another lazy bum mooching off the hardworking taxpayer?"

This is the grandest lie told in history. It is also the basis of the greatest transfer of wealth in history, all upward. We do not, and cannot, fund our government. It must fund us as the monopoly issuer of our money.

How much different would our response to the pandemic have been if we knew that its cost would never have to be "paid for" as long as it was funded by the federal government? How many ventilators, masks, and other PPE would we have had in place if affordability was never even questioned?

Our political leadership didn't fail because it didn't spend the money necessary though. It failed to protect us because it chose to protect the illusion of taxation and borrowing as funding mechanisms instead. People died, and are dying, so Americans don't discover that they don't need to die from a lack of money.

The money is the easy part. Congress pulls it out of its collective backside whenever it spends, regardless of revenue. We have, however, placed ourselves in a dilemma of real resource shortage because our system isn't geared to provide what is needed where it is needed.

I don't think I need to relitigate the timeline of the dismantling of one of our society's most important protections against such threats. What is needed is an understanding that the motivation behind that was to "save money" for the one entity that literally has no need for money to enable its spending.