Checks being sent out this week by the IRS are credited to something called the American Rescue Plan. That isn’t a mistake, but the real name of the latest free money being dropped from the helicopters.

With the plan come no controls and no rules: just here it is, folks, spend it any way you like and as fast as you want.

It doesn’t matter if the money is used to help children or to get you out of debt. It can be used in the state liquor stores, at the casinos or even the newest legal pot dispensary.

There is anywhere from $250 per child and up to $300 per child per month. The more kids, the merrier, and the more free money.

If you haven’t been paying rent or your mortgage for the past 18 months, no problem. You can still use this check for $200 tennis shoes or your daily fast-food allotment. God Bless America, right?

Once again the legislature is either blind to the real problems or are enjoying too much of the legal plant life now available in any form but smokeable. The same people wanting to expand these welfare programs (and, yes, this is just more welfare) also want to mandate higher minimum wages while failing to recognize that the wages are well controlled by the basics of supply and demand. If the demand for workers can’t be met at current wage offerings, the employers will be forced to pay higher wages in order to get the supply of workers they need.

Right now the issue isn’t the pay scale that is holding back the supply of willing workers. Instead, it is the ridiculous programs providing free money from the sky that exceeds what workers can demand in the natural supply chain.

Another $250 per child per month is going to go far in raising the number of hours kids spend using video games to entertain themselves and their parents spend watching shows that insult their intelligence even more than it has previously.

Our elected officials should have spent less time arguing the political positions of these programs and instead been looking at how to control the use of the crazy dollars. Maybe the consumers won’t be lined up at the lottery machines Friday morning, or making room on the pantry shelves for cartons of cigarettes, but if they aren’t, it will be because they had more sense than the people in Washington that sent them the pennies from heaven in the form of IRS checks.

Yes, once again: God Bless America.

— RV