by
Alice Salles
My articles My booksMy videos
Follow on:

.

US residents whose family members died with or of covid will be eligible to receive $7,000 for funeral and related expenses, New York senator Chuck Schumer (D) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) announced.

During a briefing in Queens on Monday, February 8, the duo announced that $267 million of the federally funded funeral benefits would go to low-income families in New York alone. The package, Schumer added, is part of a $2 billion disaster funds program run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that will provide benefits to families nationwide.

In her speech, Ocasio-Cortez explained that families “are having to pay for the storage of the bodies of their own loved ones” in addition to covering the funeral and burial expenses.

“This is wrong,” she added.

The announcement was received warmly on social media, so it wasn’t a surprise to see few people questioning the duo’s intentions.

But if the goal is to help those impacted by the pandemic, why did neither Democrat bring up plans to provide aid to the families who lost loved ones to various state governments’ responses to the coronavirus?

An Undeserving Bunch

Following the first reports of infections, most states had stay-at-home orders in place as early as March 2020. While some governors started lifting some of the restrictions in June, the majority kept them in place, tightening restrictions once again by Thanksgiving.

By now, we already know that the forced business shutdowns created a pattern of destruction that will be hard to remedy. According to Yelp’s data, 97,966, or 60 percent, of the 163,735 businesses listed on the platform that closed between March and August won’t reopen. To many of these small business owners and their employees, unexpected closures meant poverty, depression, and lack of access to healthcare, all problems that also lead to deaths.

According to some estimates, deaths associated with factors other than coronavirus make up at least one-third of all excess deaths during the pandemic.

Deaths of despair, which include suicide and drug abuse, have been on the rise everywhere in the country since the beginning of the lockdowns, as well as deaths caused by delayed or interrupted medical treatment. The rate of domestic abuse is also growing, putting a greater number of lives at danger. One would think congressmen would try to use the lockdown-related data to push yet another benefits package. However, they all seem to play down the deaths and suffering caused by governments’ shutdown orders.

Before pushing for funeral expense reimbursements for families whose loved ones had covid, Ocasio-Cortez tried to play down the Democrats’ support for lockdowns by blaming Republicans who don’t wear masks for “forcing” states to shut down.

“Here’s what’s ironic to me: all these Republicans, all these people who were anti-shutdown, were the same people who weren’t wearing masks, who forced us to shut down in the first place,” she said in an Instagram Live video.

Despite her claims, two of the states hardest hit by the pandemic, California and New York, were also two of the first to enact mask mandates. But on Monday, February 8, the New York congresswoman had no words of sympathy for the families whose loved ones died due to the tyrannical mandates enacted by governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who now believes that lockdowns have gone too far.

“We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high,” he tweeted following the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

If Schumer and Ocasio-Cortez are indeed working to help the low-income families who lost loved ones in 2020, they are letting down a great number of Americans (and immigrants).

You Might Also Like

Weekly SNB Sight Deposits and Speculative Positions: SNB selling euros and dollars

2021-02-08

Update February 8 2021: SNB selling euros and dollars. Sight Deposits have fallen: The change is -0.3 bn. compared to last week, this means the SNB is selling euros and dollars.

Covid and the Escalation of Medical Tyranny

2020-10-15

Covid has exposed how easy it is for government to weaponize healthcare. How long will the doctor-patient relationship remain sacred?

Our Politicians Would Probably Be Better If We Picked Them by Lot

2020-10-11

Rather than choose among a group of narcissists desperate to become popular by redistributing the income of others, why not choose officeholders by lot for a single term?

Explaining the Plan to Dismantle Schools and the Fed’s Alchemy

2020-10-06

Bob reads from an article recently tweeted out by the NEA, which calls for an end to schooling as we know it in order to promote anti-racism. He then discusses what the Fed has been up to since the coronavirus panic began.

Why “Taxing the Rich” Doesn’t Make Us Better Off

2020-09-29

The complete confiscation of all private property is tantamount to the introduction of socialism. Therefore we do not have to deal with it in an analysis of the problems of interventionism. We are concerned here only with the partial confiscation of property. Such confiscation is today attempted primarily by taxation.

Mises and Moral Relativism

2020-09-29

I heard several days ago from my friend Larry Beane that people in Walter Block’s seminar who had been reading Theory and History wondered whether Mises is a moral relativist. As I’ll try to show, the answer depends on what you mean by “moral relativist,” but in the way the term is usually understood in contemporary philosophy, he isn’t.

Monetary Policy Flapping in the Wind

2020-09-19

Stephanie Kelton’s new book has attracted much attention, and Bob Murphy and Jeff Deist have already reviewed it, with devastating results. Why another review? The policies proposed in the book are so pernicious that further exposure of what she has in store for us is needed, and I have some new points to offer for your consideration.

Hayek’s Plan for Private Money

2020-09-14

The most famous Austrian economist is 1974 Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. Because of his moderate views excusing state interventions in various circumstances, hardcore Rothbardians tend to regard Hayek as less than pure in many areas.