HBO host Bill Maher criticized the trillions spent by the government in respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as unsustainable during Saturday night’s edition of “Real Time.”
The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill signed by President Joe Biden earlier this month brought the total spent on the pandemic to nearly $6 trillion. Hearkening to history directly after the Spanish Flu pandemic ended, Maher suggested that if we’re “going to have a Roaring 20’s,” we can’t “repeat the mistakes of the last one.”
“The Roaring 20’s became the broke-ass 30’s,” Maher quipped, referring to a time that quickly “turned into a nightmare.”
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“And looking at the economic factors right now, it feels like we’re back in that headspace that we’ll never run out of cash as long as the fed doesn’t run out of ink,” the comedian said. “I’m just saying if we’re gonna do another Roaring 20s, let’s not do the two things that made the last one suck, Prohibition, and a depression at the end of it.”
Maher observed that the stock market is “divorced from [the] reality” of an economy that has “been full of news of unemployment, bankruptcies, and going out of business signs since COVID hit.”
“It can’t go on forever. We can’t all win. It’s not the ticket machine at Chuck E. Cheese,” he said. “To bail ourselves out of that depression, we spent over 10 years, 6% of our gross national product. To get out of COVID, we spent in one year, 26%. The way we’re handing out money, you’d think it had an expiration date on it.” (RELATED: Calling All Patriots: How Much Government Spending Is Too Much?)
The HBO comedian observed that the $700 billion spent to counter the 2008 financial crisis sparked nationwide protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“Now, the word billion is so last decade,” he joked. “Congress has passed $6 trillion to fight the war on COVID, $2 trillion more than we spent to win World War II.”
Maher went on to call for an end to the war on drugs, comparing it to 20’s-era Prohibition.