DEROY MURDOCK: Tonight, we’re gonna party like it’s 2019!
Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the new Department of Government Efficiency should help President re-elect Donald J. Trump implement a straightforward reform: Return federal spending to 2019 levels.
Americans lived large just before COVID-19. On New Year’s Eve 2019 — nearly five years ago — the US economy boomed. Real annual GDP grew 2.5%. Unemployment was just 3.5% and at or near record depths for blacks, Hispanics, and Americans of Asian descent. Female joblessness was at its lowest point since Eisenhower!
The economy blossomed amid robust federal spending that totaled $5.46 trillion. Uncle Sam was no aloof skinflint back then. Paring Washington’s activities to that pace will not starve babies or steer seniors into the streets.
So, as 2025 beckons, America should restore the budget threshold that prevailed before the China virus ruined everything. It sandbagged the US economy, sickened seemingly everyone, and — the Centers for Disease Control report — between January 11, 2020 and December 14, 2024, it killed 1,213,622 Americans.
These microbes (most likely from the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Institute of Virology) also triggered some $2.48 trillion in emergency spending to relieve a totally quarantined national workforce, support padlocked employers, underwrite medical assistance, finance vaccine research, and otherwise shake the disease that gripped America and pounded the globe.
This once-in-a-century calamity guaranteed Big Government. Especially after it crippled the private sector, such federal activity and expenditures were unsurprising and not entirely unjustified.
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Pruning Big Government to pre-COVID-19 dimensions and challenging every subsequent dollar will give America a fighting chance to deserve our 250th birthday in 2026 and survive until our tricentennial in 2076.
It seems like a simple benchmark to reach, but then, the amount of waste that could be cut out of the 21st-century federal government is bottomless.