Jason Chaffetz: Democrats' crisis relief a pretext to throw trillions at this 'disaster liberalism' agenda

When you hear that Democrats are about to spend $2.2 trillion (more than half the total amount this country collects in tax revenues in a given year), you might imagine that money is for roads, highways, bridges and ports. You would be less than 10% right.

The last time Democrats held majorities in Congress, we saw the same thing. The Obama-era stimulus, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) intended to fund "shovel ready" projects yielded far less than 10% for the projects used to sell the bill. Disasters come in so handy. They provide a vehicle to move legislation that could not otherwise gain popular support. This is disaster liberalism: leveraging a crisis to transfer huge sums of money out of the productive economy and into government coffers.