Freezing in NH

The NYTimes has an Op-Ed Stop Those Checks.  The premise is that economists don’t think the checks will solve the problem, so we shouldn’t give them out.  That’s great, but you can’t tell people they’ll get a check and then not give it to them.  Maybe the checks are a bad idea (I kind of think that myself) but once you announce them you need to follow through. 

The Op-Ed suggests using the money instead to clean up the mortgage mess. 

My gut tells me that the vast majority of Americans would happily give up their rebate if they knew that the money would be used instead to help families in need and start the process of cleaning up the bad debts in the housing sector. Everyone knows that we will have to spend the money eventually and that the sooner the financial sector goes through detox the better it will be for everyone.

If he’s so sure, why doesn’t he just set up a non-profit to do that and ask people to sign their checks over to it?  It should be fully funded pretty quickly, right?  I suspect he’s on crack, most people have already spent their refund in their head.  Now you’d be taking away “their money” and they won’t thank you for it.

Sure the money could be better used shoring up the financial system or creating government jobs (either directly or by starting projects that hire outside contractors) but it’s a little late to make that decision.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under articles, housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.