As we have seen in the past few relief packages, Democrats in Congress have shown their willingness to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext for endless spending. The House’s passage of the HEROES Act was no different.

America was never promised to us, and we should never take it for granted. Today, many seem to forget this fact or simply take it for granted.

In a break from our usual coronavirus programming, we recently got a quick look ahead to a looming issue that has major implications for the 2020 elections: voting by mail. President Trump’s cautionary tweet regarding the risk of voting by mail was met immediately by so-called fact checks. Not only is there a wealth of supporting evidence from both sides of the aisle that mail-in voting is a risk to election security, but soon after Trump was “fact-checked,” a report surfaced of one form of mail-in voter fraud in West Virginia. For today’s fact-checkers, life comes at you fast.

If you took a walk around Washington, D.C., last week, you weren’t alone. Strolling through my neighborhood, things felt almost the same as May 2019. People and families were out and about. Folks were out at the farmers market. While nearly everyone wore masks and made an effort to give each other the proper amount of space, I was struck by how normal life has started to seem once again. People are quite obviously ignoring local restrictions to stay inside and refrain from arbitrarily designated “non-essential activities.”

Congress has already passed relief packages totaling $3.6 trillion in response to the coronavirus pandemic. It may soon spend trillions more bailing out the U.S. Postal Service in addition to the airlines and city and state governments that have for so long embraced fiscal irresponsibility. Strange priorities in a crisis.

It’s time for us to begin the process of reopening the economy. Nearly 17 million Americans—or 11 percent of the U.S. labor force—have filed for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks. About 6.6 million people filed last week alone.

In just the past week, more than six million American workers applied for unemployment benefits as the United States entered another month of social distancing and quarantine in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy hemorrhaged more than 700,000 jobs in the month of March. The St. Louis Fed recently predicted that unemployment might hit 32 percent, greater than at the height of the Great Depression. These figures are dire.