‘Give them soy lattes and foot massages’ – Ted Cruz roasted for mocking pandemic payments

Republican Senator Ted Cruz was hammered online after he mocked a Democrat colleague’s calls for higher coronavirus payments to Americans. Cruz’s brand of ‘let them sip soy’ humor went down like a lead balloon.

Though President Donald Trump recently signed a slew of executive orders extending unemployment benefits, pausing evictions, deferring student loan payments and implementing a payroll tax cut, the American people have yet to receive another stimulus check from the federal government.

With Congress set to debate a second round of checks in the coming days, some Democrats have called for a more generous payment than the $1,200 sent to every taxpayer earlier this summer. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, for example, called on Monday for a flat payment of $2,000 per month for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic and the months afterwards, retroactive to March.

Ted Cruz evidently decided that Markey had left himself open for a little of his trademark boomer humor.

“Why be so cheap?” he tweeted. “Give everyone $1 million a day, every day, forever. And three soy lattes a day. And a foot massage. We have a magic money tree – we should use it!”

Cruz was instantly hounded for his “contempt for the poor,” and for his willingness to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the military and on corporate tax breaks.

“It’s not a goddamn joke Ted,” Markey shot back. “Millions of families are facing hunger, the threat of eviction, and the loss of their health care during a pandemic that is worsening every day. Get real.” 

Accusing Democrats and their millennial constituents of squandering their money on soy lattes, foot massages and avocado toast is low-hanging fruit for old-school fiscal conservatives. However, the US’ “magic money tree” has already been stripped of nearly all of its bounty during the coronavirus pandemic. The CARES Act, which included the first round of stimulus checks, cost $2.2 trillion dollars, half of the entire federal budget in 2019. Paying every single American taxpayer a monthly stipend of $2,000 could cost more than $10 trillion, according to one analysis cited by Forbes.

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