I’ve heard and read several analyses of the govt’s plan to give Americans a check to stimulate the economy.  The point that several commentators made is that those checks are months away from being in our pockets, and that thus they may be just too late getting to us to have any real effect.  One senator who was claiming that he’d like to have seen a different package indicated that a “quick” stimulus to the economy would be if folks spent that money within 2 months of receiving it.  He also claimed that folks on the upper end of the income scale would likely save the money or use it to pay down debt, neither of which releases new funds into the economy.

I’ll go on the record as an American looking forward to her check in the mail: I think the effect on the economy will begin well before we actually receive those checks.  I already made some comment tonight that we could do something we otherwise wouldn’t, and just count it as borrowing against our rebate check.  If you think found money is coming, the economic doom and gloom outlook that otherwise would keep you from spending money suddenly lifts.  The money will come tomorrow (as in, the sun will come out…) and we can spend against it today.

Think about the timing: for folks who haven’t paid off whatever they charged for Christmas, the dollars will come in too late for them to earmark it for the responsible thing of paying off bills.  Similarly, they’re too late to apply towards any income tax owed, and too late to even tempt you to be responsible and fund a 2007 tax year IRA.  No, they’re just funds coming at a time when the general flow of funds has evened out.   Mentally, we don’t have to account them against anything.  So we can apply them towards dreaming, and getting tastes of those dreams now.  If we’re willing to pay credit card interest charges (and lots of us are, according to the credit card industry’s statistics, are), we can have that dream NOW and not even have to wait for the IRS machinery to mesh with the US postal service and deposit a paper check into our mailbox.

My odds are on those paper checks being already spent before they’re in the majority of American mailboxes.