What Would/Will You Do With $600?

I have withheld my comment on the proposal[s] to cure our economic woes by giving Americans a few hundred dollars [the number which keeps reappearing is $600] so we can spend more.

One reason for withholding comment is that I try to focus more on local matters. Another is that I just don’t understand the tactic.

We’ve been hearing for years that collectively we Americans don’t save enough and are really broke, that bankruptcies and credit card arrears are rampant. So one would think that if we got a sudden bonus that we would think that we should all go to our bank and either deposit that bonus or apply it to our debts. But no, I guess we’re supposed to spend this new windfall.

There are problems I see right away.

We already have record national debt. The government is broke itself. Any money it gives us now will be a debt that our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren [and the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of our friends, neighbors, and relatives] will end up being responsible for, likely increasingly owing it more and more to foreign creditors. Yet somehow we are being asked to have the government spend more.

It’s funny. Not that long ago, you could get evicted from a Republican gathering just for mentioning the name of John Maynard Keynes. It would have been akin to suggesting to the Vatican that the Buddha should be canonized. This new kind of “voodoo economics” seems a lot like a modern version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a yet nobody seems willing to call to call attention to the rulers collective nakedness.

Even if giving everybody $600 [or whatever other agreed upon amount becomes enacted] were done, it might have very limited ability to help the general economy. $600 seems like an amount that would finance one heckuva trip to Mystic Lake for many people around here. That might help the economy of the Dakota, but wouldn’t do an awful lot for our neighbors on the East Side, Mac-Groveland, West Seventh, or elsewhere in our city. And there will those [perhaps inadvertently so] unpatriotic persons who insist on depositing their money or paying off debt.

It seems likely that finding a way to trickle the money out to the public [e.g., $10/week less withholding tax or $43 per month in Social Security] for a year instead of $600 in one shot which would actually be cheaper] would encourage more actual spending through more trips to restaurants, cinemas, clothiers, or even yuppie coffee shops. And people aren’t as likely to do something stupid like saving the smaller amounts.

What I guess I find most amazing is that it seems that nobody seems to raise any questions about this whole disingenuousness. Instead the whole issue seems to be whether we can give more money to more people. Admittedly, some of those people are folks who likely will be apt to put more of the bonus into the economy than a lot of those included in the House version, but I guess I just cannot understand why it seems that no responsible “leader” has questioned the whole scheme in the first place.

Maybe somebody here has an idea why.