Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Well I feel stimulated
I got my stimulus check in the mail. And while I don't think they're going to be all that effective toward reviving the economy (You lost all of your life savings in the Bear Sterns collapse and your house just lost half its value, but here's $300 to make you feel better about your life), that's not what really bothers me. It's that two days later I got yet another mailing (at my count this makes at least 5) to explain the stimulus check to me. Really? I need to have the concept of checks/money explained to me? I do live in the 21st century, and not in some pre-modern, barter economy. So in the self-fulfilling prophecy of incompetent governance that is the Bush administration, they decided to show me how inefficient and wasteful government can be by spending millions of dollars to sent out multiple mailings to every American to explain that money can be used to purchase goods and/or services. I know that no government is particularly efficient (they are each monopolies in their own countries and therefore have no competition to force them to streamline), but isn't it just possible that that money could have been spent on something more useful? They didn't have to make the conscious decision to make the stupidest use of the money possible.
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My stimulus check went to MasterCard. I maintain that if they wanted to stimulate the economy, they should have given us tax rebates in the form of giftcards. And not giftcards to Target or something, where we'd just use them to buy thing we would have bought anyway, like toilet paper. Giftcards to frivolous places like The Sharper Image, MAC Cosmetics, Yankee Candle, etc. so we'd have to buy things we don't really need.
Also, I have an etiquette suggestion for the wealthier people of the country. If the topic of the stimulus check comes up, and you made so much money last year that you don't qualify to receive it, try to restrain yourself from complaining about that fact in front of people who did not. Making so much money that you don't qualify to get $300 back is not a problem. You would think this would be obvious, but my experience says otherwise.
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