district 12

You know, the whole news about this whole Economic Stimulus package is starting to drive me nuts. It’s on the news everyday and no one seems to know how it should be applied. Here is a suggestion:

(NOTE: I am working with rough numbers here and just trying to demonstrate a simple concept).

• According to Google, the US population stands at 303,824,640 (as of July 2008).
• For simplicity sake, let us approximate this number to 304,000,000.
• Since the stimulus package is given to tax paying citizens only, let us drop this number to 303,000,000.
• Using 2005 numbers according to Wikipedia, 15.73% of the population earn $100,000 or more.
• Let us now assume 10% of the population makes $150,000 or more.
• Let us also assume that the gov’t decides to cut off 10% of those top earners from the stimulus plan, we are left with a population of 30,400,000 eligible for the package.
• The new bill being put forth is $800,000,000,000
• If we divide the money amongst all eligible tax paying citizes i.e. $800,000,000,000 / 30,400,000, we get an approximate amount of $26,316 cash per tax paying citizen.

Now tell me if this would not stimulate the economy if you got this much money from the government. To make matters worse…let’s assume the government did not throw away the first $750,000,000,000 at bailing out banks, each individual would have first gotten appx $24,671 ($750,000,000,000 / 30,400,000). This means with the second stimulus plan included, every US tax paying citizen would get a total of $50,987.

What do I know, but common sense tells me that $50,987 in my pocket would go along way then any other type of stimulus plan. Why?…because the money would go to:

• Lower level employees and managers who lost their jobs, including those whom the government is trying to bail out and those especially in manufacturing industry.
• People in debt who have no way out and are trying to make ends meet
• Those who don’t have as much debt can actually spend that money and put it back into the economy. Think about it, people will go on a shopping spree….cars, TV’s, vacations, deposit or payoff of a house etc.

Again, what do I know…after all I’m just a regular tax paying citizen. Share your thoughts and opinions.

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