We Are a One-Party Nation

Dear Chairman of the Incumbent Party:

Let me see if we can get this straight: Members of the Incumbent Party have actually passed a law that will give away $120 billion in cash at a time when the United States is running record deficits.

Where will the money come from? All of us in business have a fair understanding of where the money will come from. At the beginning of the calendar year, we reset our withholding tables and adjusted our payroll checks accordingly.

This extra amount of money, to be taken out of every single working person’s payroll check, required no act of Congress, not a single new employee in Washington, and no grandstanding television performances by the president or other members of the Incumbent Party.

It appears that members of the Incumbent Party believe that the answer to all of our problems is for all of us to go shopping.

Under the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, special checks will be printed, put in special envelopes (and addressed correctly), checked against a list to make sure no duplicate checks or incomplete checks are involved, and then mailed out to each recipient. This ought to bollix up the Internal Revenue Service and the postal service for months on end. The checks won’t be in the mail until June or July at the earliest.

If the desire is truly to get more money in the hands of working people (to paraphrase several Incumbent Party members), the simplest and most expeditious approach would be to suspend federal tax withholding from payroll checks for the time necessary to produce the desired results. This could be accomplished overnight with no administrative cost and with complete and total accuracy.

Not since the Great Depression have Americans saved so little, and in fact we spent more in 2005 and 2006 than we earned. It’s estimated that in 2007, one in every 62 households suffered a mortgage foreclosure. At the state level, our governments glorify anti-thrift institutions by financing their operations through taxes on cigarettes and lotteries.