By Mark Dankof I'm going to say some things on this subject (read below) that are not going to please Republicans or Democrats.
When it comes to increasing or sustaining unemployment benefits, and when it comes to a stimulus check for individual Americans, the Republicans and the Democrats seem far less concerned about the way in which the national debt is being exacerbated by an obscene level of national security spending to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, not to mention all of these illegitimate wars that the United States keeps getting involved with that have nothing to do with the national security of this country.
So, secondly, I think when it gets into this whole business of this money, involving coronavirus protections for individual Americans, it's important to understand that the Democratic Party is playing politics with this as well.
In the first place, you cannot continue to spend your way into prosperity and economic recovery.
The Democratic Party I think is not insignificantly pursuing policies on this whole issue of coronavirus that are deliberately designed to kill the economy in order to ensure that Trump is not reelected.
On the 31st of July, the San Antonio Express-News ran a headline that five years of economic growth, have evaporated in three months.
I don't think that that's insignificant given the fact that there is undeniable and deliberate inflation of these COVID-19 statistics on the part of the people who have every political and economic gain to accrue to their side of the ledger by inflating these statistics, both in terms of the total numbers of infections and also the issue of lethality, which has actually gone down.
That is something that is never discussed by Dr Fauchi in the news media.
Suffice it to say that the notion of shutting down one of the world's two biggest and strongest economies out of fear of a virus that has a lethality rate far less than 1% and that chiefly affects people in certain high-risk categories, pre-existing conditions, as well as the elderly, the notion that those people cannot be protected unless the entire economy is shut down, is inherently ludicrous to me.
So I would be in favor of extending the unemployment benefits.
I would be in favor of making sure that there is one more stimulus check for individual Americans in the wake of this whole catastrophic situation.
At the same time, I would face what Republicans and Democrats don't want to do, and that is to take a meat cleaver to the success of defense spending and excessive national security spending and get about the whole business of trying to restore this country economically, without resorting to an economic shutdown which is what the Democratic Party wants in order to ensure the Trump is not reelected.
So again, when I look at this whole situation, go ahead with the unemployment benefits extension, go ahead with one more stimulus check.
Cut this obscene level of national security spending in terms of larger budgetary concerns, get out of these foreign wars, and when it comes to the whole issue of the economy don't stop the economy, because of a virus that has lethality rage of less than 1% that primarily affects elderly folks and primarily affects people with pre-existing conditions.
There's no way that you can destroy an economy on that basis.
So those are my remarks for today and they're not likely to be well received by the establishment figures in either political party.
Mark Dankof, a former US Senate candidate, is a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas.
He recorded this article for the Press TV website.