by Elissa Salamy, The National Desk
WASHINGTON (SBG) - As Americans across the country receive stimulus checks, Republican lawmakers are criticizing $350 billion in the COVID relief bill that’s allocated for state and local governments.
“California at $42 billion,” is receiving the most aid, according to Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com. Texas is receiving $27.6 billion and New York $23.7 billion.
“Florida, even though they have more people that live in Florida than New York, they're only getting $17 billion,” said Andrzejewski to The National Desk's Jan Jeffcoat. “Not enough attention has gone to the $20 billion flowing to the tribal governments. Tribal governments have 3 million Native Americans and that includes the numbers in Alaska and Hawaii.”
Andrzejewski says the formula Democrats used to determine the amount of aid each state received was changed from population-based, to unemployment rate-based.
“This had the effect of shifting dollars to states like California, and New York, and Illinois and New Jersey, states whose governors have their economies more locked down,” said Andrzejewski. “Florida's the big loser in this, they'll lose about $2 billion.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called the bill “bipartisan across the country.”
“It's only in the Congress of the United States, where the Republicans have refused to meet the needs of the American people where they didn't vote,” said Pelosi. “You can be sure that all of their states and communities will be benefiting from this and they won't be complaining about it back home.”
But Andrzejewski is sceptical about exactly which communities are benefiting from the bill.
“I want to give you an example of the communities benefiting out of this bill,” said Andrzejewski. “We took a look at the 50 richest places across the country, and they stand to reap $100 million out of this bill. It's $2 million for Scarsdale, New York, the richest place on the East Coast. iI's Atherton, California, the richest place in the country, with the average household income over a half million dollars - they're going to get $1.3 million.”
Andrzejewski says that all the spending in this bill is borrowed.
“In 2008, our national debt was $10 trillion. When Donald Trump came in as president in 2016, it was around $20 trillion. Now with the passage of this bill, we're going north of $30 trillion on the national debt,” said Andrzejewsi.