Browsing: COVID-19

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated this week that people who filed for unemployment insurance during the pandemic stole somewhere between $100 billion and $135 billion in benefits — just a portion of the estimated fraud across all federal pandemic programs.

Thousands of Wisconsin renters caught a break when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed a moratorium on evictions in September 2020, ostensibly to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. But Wisconsin landlords like Mike Cerns had already paid the price. Cerns estimates he lost between $60,000 and $80,000 in unpaid rental income and the cost of repairing property damage from bad tenants he could not evict. “The federal government essentially stole my property during the eviction moratorium and the courts were an accessory to the theft,” he says.

Wisconsin’s FoodShare is supposed to be a short-term safety net program. But redistributionists have used the pandemic as an excuse to grow government involvement in one of the most basic aspects of human life — how individuals feed themselves — in an upward trajectory detached from meaningful metrics on need or economics.

Twenty months after Congress passed a bill that rained $2.53 billion down on Wisconsin, the governor’s office in sole charge of administering the funding, as well as  legislative audit and budget officials, have almost no idea of how all that money is being spent.

Awash in federal bailout cash, some Wisconsin cities ask for a property tax hike 

Turns out, as it always does when you look at where federal tax dollars end up in this country, Wisconsin is bringing up the tail end in the scramble for COVID cash.
January 13, 2022

By now, the health emergency has little to do with it

As the COVID-19 pandemic struck the  United States in 2020, Congress began shotgunning money out over the country in unprecedented ways.

Of all the wasteful impulses many politicians have, one of the worst is giving big tax breaks to dying industries.

Wisconsin voters could make 2023 a watershed year for oversight of currently unchecked spending of billions of dollars of federal funding flowing into the state.

At the height of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, correctional and other public safety agencies in Wisconsin bought at least 55 disinfection robots at a cost of more than $2.2 million.

Research indicates a correlation between proper dental hygiene, including regular dental visits, and a lower risk of serious COVID infection and complications, according to a recent study out of Cairo University.

Local governments, awash in federal cash, still trying to spend down millions from the CARES Act 

Downplayed by the media, two very different COVID-19 outcomes for the old and young

Wisconsin stumbled early getting shots into arms. Here’s what happened.

A refusal by MPS and the teachers union to resume in-person classes is a boon to other schools

Federal dollars drove personal, small bankruptcies down, but Chapter 11s were flat and could spike

Two very different COVID-19 responses produce different economic outcomes in Hudson, WI, and Stillwater, MN

Massive federal spending leaves many in the Badger State better off, but the bill is coming due

As stimulus rules supercharge costs, pressure grows to expand the unaccountable program in Wisconsin