Disturbing data from an Associated Press-Ipsos poll suggest that only 19 percent of you are going to “spend” your federal rebate. The poll revealed that you’re going to fritter away the rest of the money, paying off debt or investing in piggy banks, or sticking it under mattresses.
You are unpatriotic. And ungenerous.
The money you’re mailing off to Visa so they stop bothering you; the money you’re sticking under the mattress is intended for what the Council of Economic Advisors calls “stuff.” That money must trickle up and down if we are to shake off our credit-crunched, housing-collapsed, recession-inclined economy.
As President Bush explained, the rebate money is a “booster shot for our economy,” to be spent on such things as gratuities to Hartford Business Journal columnists.
That’s right. They don’t call this publication a “business” journal for nothing. If more than two misspelled words have to be corrected by the editor, prior to publication, they actually charge the writer for publishing the column.
Just because I put a good face on things, with the big car and the cigars and wine and women and stuff, I’m teetering on the far edge of the sluggish economy. If you gave me a booster shot of a gratuity, I wouldn’t put it under the mattress. That money would fly back out the door on consumer purchases that I’ve put on hold, ever since I spent all my money investing in Hartford’s Front Street development project.
I mean, that was a no-lose, public-private partnership kind of a thing, right? Well, I’ve been living on macaroni and cheese for months now, waiting for you to stimulate my economy.
Whatever money you don’t invest directly on me should be sprinkled throughout Greater Hartford, to help me unload my garage full of “Better Yet, Connecticut” and “New England’s Rising Star” T-shirts. Each dollar that you spend on regional stuff will stimulate income redistribution from wealthy publishers to impoverished columnists and other deserving poor.
To be sure, the merits of particular spending decisions are in the eyes of the beholder. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has jumped on the rebate bandwagon with a revised proposal to cap local property tax growth. Wouldn’t it be better for the economy if you spend your money on a flat-screen television rather than on a new bicultural, bilingual reading specialist administrator for your local school system?
For instance, the Rell administration proposal to split the state Department of Transportation into two — a Department of Highways and a Department of Ships and Trains and Solar Spaceships and Stuff — would open up many business opportunities that up to now have been snuffed out by stifling bureaucracy.
The new Department of Highways would put out to bid the harvesting of tumbleweed that grows on the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes that no one is allowed to use, unless they rent a second passenger or a life-like sex toy to ride with them. With a tax rebate and property tax savings in your pocket, you could farm those lanes, sell the tumbleweed, and make enough to move to Florida, where residents already have a 3 percent property tax growth cap — and there is no state income tax.
To enhance even further this rebate, the Democrats want to create an earned income tax credit that would provide an income-tax-rebate for people who don’t actually pay any income tax. This would be sort of like paying a columnist for a column he never actually wrote, because, well, sometimes he is really, really busy with other important stuff and it’s not his fault.
But none of this will work unless you spend your rebate check. Start with the columnist gratuity. It will put you in the groove.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
