Simply and utterly pointless

[Greybird]

Oh, the spectacle of the Elected King being so happy about sending checks to the populace ... it almost made me lose my lunch today.

And it's not even new(ly printed) money. It's just gyrations about overpayments most people were going to have refunded in the first place.

Say, to simplify, you consistently get a refund of overpaid taxes amounting, each year, to $1000. All this "stimulus" means is that, for 2008, instead of getting a $1000 refund in June 2009 ... well, erhm ...

... you get $600 in June 2008, and $400 in June 2009.

WHAT IS THE POINT? Except to pander for votes given in gratitude for Republican pre-election "generosity," accomplished with more bureaucratic wastage of your own money?

(And some who weren't going to even owe taxes are getting checks of $300 anyway, which is welfarism, pure and simple.)

The only morally legitimate refund percentage, of course, is ONE HUNDRED. In gold. Let Ragnar do it.

* * *

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. — Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" (1776)

[Barbara Branden]

But Steve, sadly I fear that you are not properly appreciative of all the gifts government so generously gives us -- such as Social Security and Medicare and rent control and the licensing of handymen and hair stylists. Don't you understand that these are free, that they cost us nothing? And just wait until Hillary or Obama gives us socialized medicine, again a generous gift which will insure our health all the way to bankruptcy or death, whichever comes first, just as it does in Canada. (Of course it's only vicious propaganda spread by the forces of evil that Canada is suffering a severe shortage of doctors and hospitals and available medical technology, and that Canadians whenever possible flee to the United States for health care.)

Barbara

[Alfonso Jones]

But Steve, sadly I fear that you are not properly appreciative of all the gifts government so generously gives us -- such as Social Security and Medicare and rent control and the licensing of handymen and hair stylists. Don't you understand that these are free, that they cost us nothing? And just wait until Hillary or Obama gives us socialized medicine, again a generous gift which will insure our health all the way to bankruptcy or death, whichever comes first, just as it does in Canada. (Of course it's only vicious propaganda spread by the forces of evil that Canada is suffering a severe shortage of doctors and hospitals and available medical technology, and that Canadians whenever possible flee to the United States for health care.)

Barbara

Two things I wish Rand could have lived to have seen:

1) The fall of the Berlin Wall (I can just imagine her eyes as the TV feed showed the wall coming down!)

2) The utter corruption of discourse - one example being what Steve (Greybird) has just pointed out.

Alfonso