Economists may be skeptical, but rebate checks just might help out

[Javaman]

(More whistling past the graveyard)

The stimulus strategy
Economists may be skeptical, but rebate checks just might help out

updated 10:17 p.m. CT, Mon., Feb. 18, 2008
When President Bush signed into law last week a fiscal stimulus package of income-tax rebates and business tax breaks, it was the first good news for American consumers in a while. The plan will give many families a $1,200 windfall, and it comes with a message Americans always like to hear: We can spend our way to prosperity.

Turning those checks into new televisions and T-bones, the argument goes, will keep recession away. This is a familiar and popular idea—politicians on both sides of the aisle praised the plan—but it once seemed like heresy.

In 1932, with America suffering through the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for President, attacked President Herbert Hoover for spending too much trying to fight the downturn. Hoover, he charged, was recklessly running up the deficit and driving the country toward “the poorhouse.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23228023/

[El Pinko]

1. The rebate will be a blip.

Nobody's going to complain about receiving them, but they do absolutely NOTHING to address the underlying economic problems of job offshoring and stagnant working-and-middle-class wages that are the cause of the problem to begin with.

But the president is GWB, so it would be silly to expect anything other than a band-aid on a massive shotgun wound anyway.

I'm praying fervently that a President Obama would be much more proactive and progressive in his approach to the economy than he appeared as a senator, or how he has portrayed himelf in the campaign.

More Clintonlike Reagan-lite policies are not going to help this time, There is no internet boom or foreign capital inflow to help us this time. We need to rebuild the bedrock of our economy, and I daresay, make the wealthy start paying their fair share of the tax burden like they did in the 50s and 60s.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. bbbbbbthather

How can an article contradict it's own argument so many times and still be relevant?

[Double T]

3. Final $$$$$ gift to wall street and the corporations..........

from the MOST CORRUPT WH in history. Just pile on MORE debt to hasten our demise.

[Wizard777]

4. Bush is paying you 600.00 to allow him to put you 10,000.00 in debt.

How that help in any way?