Linkfest: Updates on the "Stimulus"
How’s that tax-rebate, needs-to-be-quick, bipartisan fiscal “stimulus” package doing?
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I blogged previously:
This $150 billion disgrace … still faces review — bloating? — in the Senate …
We can now lose the question mark:
Shrugging off a personal plea from President Bush, senators from both parties said yesterday that they will push for significant additions to the $150 billion stimulus package hammered out Thursday by House leaders and the administration.
Senators from both parties? Who could have seen that coming?
Nothing obliterates gridlock and replaces it with “bipartisanship” more quickly and more completely than incumbent entrenchment (cf. “campaign finance reform”). And what could possibly endear unsophisticated voters more to their representative in Congress (or to the party of their president) than a check?
Acta es fabula, plaudite!
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Having made sure that people who actually pay high income taxes do not get a check (which would be too fair — go figure), and having made sure that the working poor who pay no income taxes do get a check (which would mean this is not a rebate but welfare — go figure), who could the politicians, drenched in their “bipartisanship,” possibly have forgotten?
Retirees living off Social Security are frustrated that they won’t get tax rebate checks through a bipartisan economic stimulus package before the House. Senate Democrats Friday began efforts to include them.
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[The House plan] would leave out about 20 million senior citizens living chiefly on Social Security. … “Less than half of all Americans 65 and older would get it,” said AARP spokesman Jim Dau.
Ah yes, the entitlement elderly. Can’t let them go without sucking some more taxpayer blood, right? Senators are tripping over themselves to introduce checks for them, among other vote-buying measures, possibly to the point of a conference committee showdown with the House. Stay tuned…
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As I mentioned previously, the “needed fast” rebate checks can’t be mailed before May at the earliest. Of course, “needed fast” really only means “needed before the November elections,” so the politicians are all set.
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Guess who (besides poke-in-the-eye taxpayers like me) doesn’t like the stimulus package? Economists. Go figure.
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Guess who also doesn’t like the stimulus package? The New York Times. But of course not for the same reasons that the economists don’t like it. Go figure.
Similar Posts:
- I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Turn You Into a Welfare Bum
- On the Calls for a “Stimulus Package”
- Obama’s Itchy Stimulus Finger
- The Ploy of Checks
- Behold Another “Bipartisan Achievement”
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I read through all the economists listed at that link, and they're all over the place on why the stimulus package is bad. Heh. Eleven economists, twenty-one "other hands."
This is so typical. Economists as far apart as Steven Landsburg and Paul Krugman all agree that the proposed stimulus package is bad (albeit for very different reasons) so naturally everyone in government ignores them.
Oh, well. I guess it will help with the car payments…
I'm just waiting to see the 8×10 color glossy photos of my senators and House representative that come packaged with the check, with a nice letter that amounts to nothing more than "don't you like this money? Remember who gave it to you when you go to the polls!"