While I generally agree with the incompetence of the Trump administration, I think COVID would have impacted the economy no matter who was President. Remember this was a pandemic and it fucked up the whole world economy pretty bad, not just the USA.

It can also be argued that the US was printing massive amounts of money to float the economy long before that, and that the COVID spending was the proverbial "cherry on top" that finally kicked inflation into high gear, especially since many companies used the real struggles of the economy as a shield to price-gouge consumers.

The PPP was widely abused, but it was far from the worst corporate handout the US has done in history. I would actually argue this was partially "chickens coming home to roost" since we never actually really addressed issues that caused the crash of 2008. I'd been waiting since 2008 for the other shoe to drop, ever since Henry Paulson asked US taxpayers for $700 billion to spend on failing banks (originally asked with no strings attached and no oversight... sound familiar?*).

To act like this isn't a long-term result of Republican fuckery and just Trump is ignoring a long history of Republican Presidents trying to get away with no oversight spending.

Edit: Bush also oversaw the war in Iraq, and the astronomical costs of the war were supposed to be paid for in Iraqi oil but in practice that just meant US oil companies getting good deals. The wars costs still haunt us today, while we should be more haunted by the massive Iraqi civilian death toll.

Further, the TSA is a glorified jobs program to make a Republican economy look less shitty.

*https://www.npr.org/transcripts/94985539?storyId=94985539

Mr. ANDREW ROSS SORKIN (Columnist, New York Times): Well, if you'd indulge me, I'll read you just one little passage. And in my mind, it's stunning. And the passage reads the following.

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and :committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Period, end of quote.

And I think when you look at that, and you see the sort of power grab that the Treasury Department is making in this $700 billion proposal, it's somewhat astonishing because there's no oversight. And that's not to say that this proposal's a bad one. It's not to say that this is the wrong way to do it, in that the $700 billion and the actual mechanism that they're considering are right or wrong. I'm not even making a judgment on that.

The judgment, though, that I think even Washington have already come to in the past 24 hours, is that the approach that the Treasury Department and the Fed are taking in terms of their ability to oversee this without any oversight, frankly, is the problem.