The House of Representatives and the quote unquote president want to give my wife and me a check to help “stimulate” the economy. Depending upon the final details, we could get something like $2100 by May. The thing is, we don’t want it. And neither does anyone else we’ve asked about it.

Nobody at the recent Chamber of Commerce board meeting wanted it. There, it was widely viewed as an election-year ploy, and one probably favoring Democrats.

At the Chamber mixer the other night, nobody I spoke with there wanted it either.  Except they said it was intended to help Republicans retain the White House.

At the barber shop on Thursday none of the three barbers, nor any of the patrons, wanted it. Between barbers (one female, two male) and patrons, there were youngish and oldish, white and Hispanic, and several variations of the above — and nobody wanted the refund.

Nobody in my playwriting workshop is demanding it. No one said they’d send it back, but they don’t actually want it. And someone I know who really needs the money summed up what everyone I’ve discussed this with is saying:  This refund is a bad idea, because the country can’t afford any more debt. He and his wife would rather not have the check if the government would commit instead to balancing the budget.

I don’t think the refund is a clever ploy for either the Republicans or the Democrats. What I think it is is a bailout of lenders who have made very bad loans, as well as some icing for retailers. Yes, I expect that everyone who gets that check is going to perhaps make one extra house payment, or one more credit-card payment, or buy that iPhone that the guy interviewed in the L.A. Times last week said he’d been drooling over and could now buy with his government economic-stimulus refund check. And then the $300, or $600, or however much, will be gone, with no lesson learned by anyone.

And where will it go? Onto the ledger for my children and their children and all the other children who will be paying for it and for all the other excesses and mistakes of the last seven years. It will also go onto the ledger for the people of China, who will be paying for it until they start to shift their investments from dollars into euros — in other words, only for a little while.

So… if it isn’t a good idea to further mortgage the nation to hand out freebie checks to cover other mortgages on houses people shouldn’t have bought from people who were paid to sell things they knew people couldn’t afford, what would be a better idea?

Perhaps a public works project that actually results in needed improvements while feeding the economy.

Perhaps letting banks bear the brunt of their bad decisions. We privatize the income — note the hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses paid during the housing bubble — but we socialize the bailout. Let’s not bail them out. Let’s let the housing market find its natural landing place, creating an opportunity for the millions of people around here at least who couldn’t ever afford to buy a house before.

Perhaps passing along a hard but necessary lesson for all of us:  that there are no free rides, that ultimately someone always has to pay — and this time, it should be us.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.