It is not “stimulus” to give money to businesses that are not allowed to operate. So either the two-plus trillion-buck stimulus bill targets those enterprises that are actually allowed to operate, or the bill actually serves as a compensation package for those business that have been suppressed, prohibited. (“Non-essential” ones, you know.) Ah, policy in the plague year!

And the idea that Congress must “save” the airlines is ridiculous. There is very little air traffic right now. Had they been allowed to go into bankruptcy — barring loans or stock takeovers — some other businesses would buy the planes and fly them in better times. Boo hoo about current ownership.
Without loss, the profit-and-loss system is null and void. It becomes a profit-and-subsidy system. It is “bipartisan socialism,” if you will, where all risk has been socialized by the federal government, but where profit is allowed as a political favor.

Laughing (I am) at those who say they want to “get money out of politics” in that regime. No one can be that naive.

Politics in such a regime — state bailout capitalism, we could call it — is ALL ABOUT MONEY. It is Alexander Hamilton’s dream system, where the corruption is built into the fabric of government.

Neither party’s ideological supporters can defend this. Woke social democracy cannot defend this, and the Republicans’ family-centered nationalism has nothing to do with this, intrinsically. Bailouts are something else again, and its support is quite mercenary.

So the open question is: was it forced upon Trump, by circumstance, or was this his end-game?