The "stimulus" checks are simply a short-term goose in the ass. The thing we ought to be thinking about is making the Bush tax cuts permanent.

First of all, any time the government wants to relinquish control of my money, they're welcome to do so. I'll never turn down the opportunity to hang on to my money. No one's really gone into great detail about this yet, but I get the sense that there's a little grumbling going on about the size of the check in relation to the size of one's income. I know everyone's getting a check, but there is validity to restricting it only to those who have paid federal taxes (taxes that go to the state or local municipality don't count here). If you haven't paid federal taxes, then yes, it is a welfare check.

Second, people (mostly Bush opponents) are very quick to criticize this move in and of itself because it may not promote the "right kind" of spending. Uh, if someone pays off a bill or uses it to offset gas prices etc, how is that bad? Simple, it isn't. We're all griping about energy costs and debt, right? Well, why not use this "stimulus" to ease that financial burden a little? My criticism of this is the fact that once the $600 is spent, it's gone. Those tax cuts that expire in the next year or so are going to have a much bigger long-term effect than everyone getting a few hundred bucks in the mail.

Thinking big picture here, in addition to keeping taxes low, we need to deal with the energy situation. We need to be independent of foreign oil, plain and simple. It seems that a lot of people are thinking about pushing for alternative fuels as the one and only solution. While new technology and alternative fuels are necessary long term, they are still being developed. We are not at a point where those alternatives are economically feasible yet. The environmentalists hate when I say this, but we need to drill for our own oil. Period. It is still important to work on new technology, but if we have any hope of breaking this economic juggernaut, we need to take that first step of tapping our own resources and using them here at home, not to supply the rest of the planet.

One way or the other, I get to take a vacation this year thanks in part to getting some of my money back. I'm cool with that.

We can drill for all the oil we want, but our supply will never catch up with our demand, according to every estimation I have seen.

Alternative fuels and drilling (as long as its used here, as you said) could be a piece of the solution, but increasing supply is the smaller part of the equation- its much more important that we decrease demand.

But if we drill without decreasing demand we will simply prolong our addiction to oil, rather than end it. Its like stopping by the methodone clinic and then hitting up your street dealer on the way home.

Cutting taxes will certainly help, but I'm not sure the Bush tax model is best or fairest way to go about it.

But Chris is right, drilling is not going to make prices drop, it will just keep them from rising as fast. That is to say, we should drill more, but we can't treat it as a solution. The main reasons are that 1. New fields take a while to bring online. ANWR would take a decade to come to market. 2. The rate at which we could expand production is probably equal or less than the rate at which current production is decreasing, and...

3. Most importantly, drilling oil costs a lot more than it used to. This is because all the "low hanging fruit" of oil has been discovered and drilled already. There's more oil left, but its harder to extract and thus costs more. This is the biggest piece of info that has been missing from the "drill more" solution. Sure we can drill more, so long as we're willing to pay increasing amounts for it.

The short term solution is the conserve fuel, and reduce demand (Drive less). The medium term solution includes drilling, but needs to be matched with more efficiency in supply chains as well as in fuel consuming products (Drive your hybrid less). The long term solution is to invest in alternative sources of energy as well as a transportation and city planning infrastructure that promotes efficiency (take the solar powered train.) This sort of investment needs to begin right now, if we're going to negotiate this curve in time.

I'm generally not as optemistic as these guys, but if they are correct, then great:

<link>

According to these folks, demand is falling.

JW and Chris, you just repeated exactly what I said. The one missing piece of the puzzle is drilling for our own oil. It's a problem we've brought on ourselves by not dealing with this sooner. I think I was pretty clear when I said that new technology and alternative fuels are necessary for the long-haul. I'm just saying that we need energy independence and step one is telling OPEC to go screw themselves and go get our own oil.

As far as taxes go, how would one be more "fair" than an across-the-board tax cut? I'm going to lose my mind if I hear one more time that we should raise taxes on the "rich" but slash taxes at the middle and low level. That has NO economic impact whatsoever because you're not rescuing enough dollars from the pit of the federal government. I just find it interesting that Russia, of all places, has lower tax rates than we do. Instead of calculating every angle to make it look "fair," we need to do what will be effective. Again, it's not about being nice or being someone's savior. It's about rescuing enough dollars to effectively free up the economy.

FordTruck5Speed:

Instead of calculating every angle to make it look "fair," we need to do what will be effective. Again, it's not about being nice or being someone's savior. It's about rescuing enough dollars to effectively free up the economy.

Do you think the Bush tax cuts have actually been effective?

FordTruck5Speed says: "The thing we ought to be thinking about is making the Bush tax cuts permanent...Thinking big picture here, in addition to keeping taxes low,"

LeRoy: The 'big picture' item you are not seeing, even though it is staring you in the face, is the exploding size of the national debt. It has nearly doubled in the last seven years, from ~$5.1 trillion to ~$9.6 trillion. [And that is using the numbers from the highly questionable accounting methodology that is usually reported in the press, which some finance professors have dubbed 'Enron-style accounting; the real picture is much worse.]

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis of what John McCain's proposed fiscal policies would do. It was not pretty. Making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and adding even more on top of it, as McCain wants to do, would cause the national debt to simply balloon.

You seem to be a devotee of Cheneynomics, the wildly irrational notion that the national debt, and budget deficits, simply don't matter, and that we can just ignore them.

It is that kind of toxic thinking that has got us into the mess we are in today.

A nation cannot borrow its way into prosperity. Sooner or later, the chickens come home to roost.

"I'm just saying that we need energy independence and step one is telling OPEC to go screw themselves and go get our own oil."

But that's not exactly what I said. We will never be able to produce enough oil for ourselves to tell OPEC to go screw themselves.

Ford:

You are not getting "some of your money back," all you are doing is stealing money from people like me that already pay a ridiculous amount in federal taxes, which doesn't take into account the extremely high cost of living of my area. Anyone who gets the check is a welfare recipient, plain and simple, not just those that didn't pay taxes.

Well, Blue, yes, I think the Bush tax cuts did some good for the economy. I'd like to know how high taxes would have been better after 9/11 and with the current cost of energy. Take more money out of the pockets of Americans and out of the bankrolls of companies that employ said Americans. Not sure how that helps the economy.

The national debt has nothing to do with rate cuts. It has to do primarily with spending. If you over-spend, the deficit, and consequently the debt goes up. That's what has irritated me about the Bush administration. It's no the tax cuts that are the problem, it's out-of-control spending that the Republicans are supposedly against. Unfortunately, they haven't exactly been true to their fiscally conservative ideals. Now, you look at Barack and Hillary, their solution is even worse. They're not looking at spending cuts, just tax hikes. Instead of solving the problem, they want to band-aid the situation with your money. Frankly, I think we free individuals pay enough in taxes and it's the bureaucrats that need to clean up their act without forcing us to foot the bill. By the way, there's no law against you sending them more of your money if you really want to. If you write 'em a check, they'll be happy to keep it.

FordTruck5Speed: The national debt has nothing to do with rate cuts. It has to do primarily with spending. If you over-spend, the deficit, and consequently the debt goes up.

LeRoy: "The national debt has nothing to do with rate cuts". Let us ponder that extraordinary claim for a moment. Following this kind of 'logic', we should immediately cut all tax rates to zero, since no one really enjoys paying taxes. Taking your statement at face value, this would cause no change in the national debt. Now: Do you truly believe what you said, even for a millisecond?

Quoting from the textbook on Intermediate Macroeconomics by Abel and Bernanke (yes, that Bernanke), the level of government saving S(g) is given by:

S(g) = (T - TR - INT) - G

where T = total tax revenues, TR = transfer payments (Social Security payments, corporate welfare and the like), INT = interest on the national debt, and G = government purchases of goods and services. The three terms in parentheses constitute net government receipts. For America, S(g) has, of course, been strongly negative for the last six years, and generally negative for nearly all of the past 60 years. Reason: Because our tax revenues are not as great as the sum of transfer payments, government purchases, and interest on the national debt.

If you truly believe that tax revenues have nothing to do with tax rates, then I have reason to question your arithmetical skills. [Where did you say you went to school?]

And you can save us all your little lectures about the Laffer curve. We've heard them before.

FordTruck5Speed:

you look at Barack and Hillary, their solution is even worse.

LeRoy: Sorry, not according to the non-partisan analyses, which show that McCain's proposed programs would cause the deficit to grow by a much larger amount than either of the Obama or Clinton programs. Unfortunately, none of the three major candidates are taking this issue very seriously. Which means that America is in very deep trouble, indeed.

Just a small thought on taking the national debt seriously: I remember (thus proving that I am very very old) when some peppy young person said to Adlai Stevenson that all thinking Americans were going to vote for him, and Adlai replied that this was a nice thought, but all in all he'd rather win.

We don't LIKE honesty from people running for office. we want seashells and balloons. We want hope; all flavors of hope. The big disagreement in the current election seems to be between those who believe irrationally in our ability to improve the world through reasonable means and those who believe irrationally that we can protect ourselves from the "bad guys" (these are the "realists") with military threats and reprisals.

Since Fordboy is a big believer in the "realist" scenario, and since he also wants to preserve (and expand) the Bush tax cuts, it doesn't take Doc Bernanke's pretty formula to prove that he is living in cloud cuckoo land. But we already knew that. The PROBLEM is that we are in an election year, and cloud cuckoo land votes.

I'm confident that, if she somehow managed to swindle her way into the nomination, HRC will run a bloody-shirt class war campaign. She is, after all, the grand champion of "winky winky." But after the election is safely gone by, and the great Republican die-off of the 21st century is a newly-minted fact of history, we will all be faced with the same numbers as now, and worse. It's always too late when Americans start dealing with stuff. But what can we do to stop the bleeding?

Anybody want to buy a used war?

That was how Adlai Stevenson responded to the young person who called out to him that "All thinking people will be voting for you!"

Thanks for reminding me of that; I hadn't thought about that quote for years.

It does seem very relevant to our current Presidential campaign.

What a mess the next President will be inheriting. Whoever it is.

How do you figure I am not a welfare recipient and I never saw a penny it went to a debt like alot of people, it did nothing for the economy. Well you may be paying alot in taxes but I bet you own a house worth over 300.000 dollars and have a gas guzzeling SUV plus a pick up and recreational toys to boot so I don't want to hear you whining some of us work our tail off to barely make it and only own one vehicle, by the way no TOYS or SUV's either. Who in their right mind would keep something that would eat upwards of 400 - 800 in gas to fill it. Assinine.

FYI I have not had a vacation in 10 years so think about that before slinging arrows and making conjectures .