House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/opinion/25krugman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Krugman addresses the point that most of the people who will be receiving these checks will be tucking them into savings instead of spending them right away.
I'm still not clear on whether this is an actual tax rebate, or whether it's a shell game where they pay you now what they would pay you later. Either way, it doesn't look like the economic downturn is avoidable, and the longer we try to stave it off with these sorts of half-measures, the worse it's going to be.
If you're interested in the economic picture, I highly recommend you visit my friend Monkeyfister. He's been all over this for a while. He's also been on top of peak oil, another factor which may come into play here. I blog-roll him, and I don't blog-roll anybody whom I don't think is worth reading (which is why it's so small).
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