By John McClaughry

The Peterson Foundation, which tracks government spending, recently came up with a surprising result.

Their economists added up all the funds shipped to each of the 50 states — to state government, to businesses, to individual checks, to hospitals and so on — in response to the pandemic in early 2020 through the end of the year.

Here are the results. The feds sent little Vermont $4.8 billion dollars. That comes to $7,729 per person. That sum puts Vermont second among the 50 states, trailing only New York, which got $7,840 per person. Even so, the state budget department is projecting a $180 million General Fund shortfall for next year.

That $4.8 billion is an astonishing inflow of money — and it’s not our tax dollars. That all came from the federal government issuing more debt — over $2 trillion more debt at last count, and President Joe Biden vows to spend another $2 trillion — all of it borrowed — as soon as he gets control of Congress.

Even before Biden’s coming expansion, the national debt has shot up past $27 trillion, which is 40 percent larger than the gross domestic product of the American economy. When President Donald Trump took office in 2017, the debt was about $20 trillion. What’s debt to a president whose whole business career was financed by debt?

Can this debt financed spending be sustained? Of course not.

John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute. Reprinted with permission from the Ethan Allen Institute Blog.