This is an argument with a premise: that the Bush administration has grossly misspent public funds. While billions were poured into the Iraq war, education, health care, alternative energy research, and the arts were neglected. The economy took a turn for the worse, and the administration’s economic stimulus plan seeks to turn that around by putting $300 dollars in my pocket. GIving the public a little cash doesn’t treat the underlying causes of the economic downturn. It also, most likely, won’t work. Check out some of the reasons linked under “10 good reasons why.”
Everyone likes free money. But it’s not really free; it’s money that should have gone into all the domestic services the government is meant to provide–health care, protection of environmental resources, assistance for the needy.
As a country, we are about to receive 150 billion dollars. It’s up to us how to spend it. Sneakers or clean water? Ipod or medical care? It takes a bit of imagination to think that the consuming public will step up and do what the federal government won’t.
But I think it’s worth a try.
1 Comment
April 18, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Actually, the ’stimulus’ money is not coming out of our tax dollars, it’s coming out of the earnings of people not yet born. We can stimulate the economy by buying what we can afford, cutting out the chunk that banks and credit card companies take. Bartering is a great stimulus and returns tax moneys to our pockets as well.
While unemployment is real and painful, the house of cards that banks and government keeps building has to fall periodically. The best protection that people can have is to invest in local production and trade centers which will provide insulation from these nationwide ‘corrections’ and which are more responsive to local needs and controls.