Worker Stimulus Bill
| February 28th, 2009 by Robert | Word Count: 778 | Reading Time 3:02 | 2,985 views |
Over the recent past, I’ve written a few articles about the stimulus bills and other government payouts designed to help us out of our deepening recession. I remember one article where I detailed a stimulus plan for heads of households. My numbers revolved around putting money into the hands of the worker who will in turn spend money and hopefully save some along the way. In that article, I did some simple math and purposely overestimated the amounts of true heads of households just for giggles. The stimulus bill passed near the end of the Bush administration allocated 750 billion tax payer dollars to rescue the financial markets. Given that we have 300 million Americans on any given day by census reports, I estimated there to be 150 million heads of household as measured by tax returns. Assume a husband and wife and kids are involved and average that over the population, a simple half split is a good ballpark figure.
My simple idea was to divide the $750 billion up evenly between the 150 million people. Give them the stimulus money since it was tax payer funded and the results would be an effective tax rebate to those who paid in. I only support giving money back to people who legitimately file their taxes year in and year out… if you don’t file, you don’t qualify for federal assistance in my opinion. Anyway, that’s an article for another day…
Dividing $750 billion (10 zeroes) by 150 million (7 zeroes) comes out to a nice round $5000 per HOH. How nice would that be for your family? Well, let’s do this a different way. I just went and checked the government’s census website and in 2007, the labor force itself consisted of 151 million people age 16 and over (my HOH number appears to be fairly overestimated as I assumed). Based on that, I’m going to remove my HOH evaluation and focus upon workers. Now, everyone who works AND files a tax return gets $5,000. For my household that means my family would get $20,000 because both of our sons work and my wife and I both work. We all file and we all pay our taxes.
Sounds great doesn’t it… putting the stimulus money into the hands of individuals who will spend the money at the local restaurant or grocery store or have enough to pay a credit card off or two and be able to buy a new gas saving vehicle for the future. But, that’s not where the money went, it went to wealthy corporations who were allowed to survive rather than face their punishment for taking insane risks with everyone’s money. As we have seen, the initial $750 billion did nothing to quell the recession’s decline. Throwing money at a problem is not the solution.
Now, Obama has just signed into law another $800 billion stimulus package… along with putting an additional $750 billion in the budget for failing banks and other institutions to help end the recession. Throw in a few other hundred billion spent on the side by our government and we are looking at a minimum total of at least $2.5 trillion (that’s 11 zeroes). Keeping with the worker division… that equates to roughly $16,500 per worker in the United States.
Rather than $20,000 for my household, we would be looking at $66,000 hitting our bank accounts. According to the census information, the average household is 2.6 people and the average family is 3.2 people. So, at minimum, you would likely see $33,000 in each working family’s account. Do you think that would spark the economy? I think it would create a raging inferno. The economy would likely begin growing at such a pace that inflation would be a serious issue as a potential side effect (inflation can be dealt with… millions of people without jobs is even worse).
Maybe we can be a little safe here and just split the $2.5 trillion up in half… half to the workers and half to the corporations. Even then, we are looking at $8,300 per worker. My simple point is that these stimulus billed are misnamed. They are not stimulating anything but corporate wealth. Worker wealth has continued to decrease and jobs are still being lost as if they were water pouring through a funnel. Stimulate the local economies where the local business owners are… stimulating the workers by giving them resources to pull our families through this mess. Instead of trickle down stimulus effects, maybe we should focus on trickle up. Who better to stimulate the economy than those who actually put forth the effort to make it work?
on March 3rd, 2009 at 9:30 pm:
There you go again using common sense thinking. That is one of the first rules to being a politician, never say anything that you really mean ( lie ), talk in circles so no one really knows what you are saying, and if you say it often enough and loud enough people will be convinced that it must be a good idea because you are getting paid good money to make wise decisions.
So don’t expect politicians to use common sense, they have all been re-programed with this part left out. Keep up the good work though, someday maybe someone will sneak through the process and not be re-programed.
on March 5th, 2009 at 9:28 pm:
These re-programmed politicians who were previously true American citizens must be forced from office either via more strict term limits or just outright public mutiny by rising up and voting our morals. These career politicians and their families are ruining this country and the foundation it was built upon.
If only common sense ruled the ballot box, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today. We need a wholesale change-out of our leadership parties from President all the way down to our local aldermen. Put real citizens in office, not these lawyers and power mongers who think they know what’s best for us.