Anything goes, if people are stupid.

On becoming president, Joe Biden "stewarded an economic relief bill amounting to $1.9 trillion through Congress", equivalent to "close to 9% of US GDP in 2019, the pre-pandemic year", wrote Prof Pulapre Balakrishnan. "It comes on top of the stimulus of $3.5 trillion undertaken by the Trump administration. These two packages combine to 25% of the country's GDP in 2019." In contrast, "The latest issue of 'The Fiscal Monitor' published by the IMF shows additional public expenditure by the central government (in India) up to December 31 in response to Covid-19 amounting to 3.1% of GDP. The counterpart figure for the US is 16.7%. Of this, the spending on health was a mere 0.2% in India and 2.3% for the US." Percentages do not indicate the true difference in spending. The US spent 25% of $21.43 trillion GDP on  stimulating its economy and 2.3% on healthcare for a population of 333 million, while India spent 3.1% of its GDP of around $2.9 trillion in 2019 on stimulus and a minuscule 0.2% on the health of a humongous 1,390 million people. "Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharman's budget aims to spend big to push growth. Outlays in key areas such as healthcare and infrastructure have been ratcheted up to spur economic activity," wrote Nikhil Inamdar for BBC. "Presenting a budget in a year of economic contraction for only the third time in India's history, Sitharaman chose to spend her way into securing a V-shaped recovery and placed most weightage on infrastructure, with a eye on the multiplier effect of building roads, rail lines and ports," wrote Aparna Iyer and Asit Ranjan Misra. "Detractors will cry about missed opportunity," wrote Ajit Ranade. "For now, though, the country is a clear winner, and kudos to the finance minister for a spectacular budget." "If the economy were indeed on a V-shaped recovery path, why are the government's tax projections for 2021-22 lower than what they were a year ago? asked Roshan Kishore. "There is an additional problem with what is a premature withdrawal of the fiscal boost. a lot of sequential recovery, especially in rural areas, was contingent on the government's support." There can be only two interpretations for the limited spending by the Indian government, wrote Balakrishnan. One is the government's economic ideology, and the second is that "it simply does not care". There maybe a third explanation and that is, the government is broke, having squandered Rs 11 trillion in 4.5 years it earned till December 2018 through enormous taxes on petrol and diesel, Rs 6.58 trillion from 2018-19 to 2020-21 from taxes, even as prices of fuel went up, and a handout of Rs 1.76 trillion from the Reserve Bank's (RBI) reserves. "The working class in India has historically been treated with a combination of contempt and apathy. Several surveys and reports highlighted the extent of loss of livelihoods and the corresponding hunger situation," wrote Rajendran Narayanan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying out his new luxury plane while visiting Bangladesh which is celebrating its 50th anniversary of independence from Pakistan in 1971. That's the way the money goes. And pop go the people. Stupid people.