Stimulus Plan Saves the States – from What?

The citizens of New York and California – at least those who know how to earn a living – must be thrilled with the money their states are receiving from the federal spendulus plan.  This plan was designed to help those states with the most Democrat votes, was it not? Read more

Tracking Our Economic Recovery

Last week I wrote about my reactions to the President’s first press conference and particularly his comments about the stimulus plan.  You may recall that one of the reporters asked the President how we would know if and when the plan was working, i.e., what metrics should we be monitoring to make that determination?  The President kept repeating “create or save” 4 million jobs.

I’ve since learned that the White House has created a special website (Recovery.gov) that is specifically directed at promoting and tracking the progress of the stimulus plan.  Read more

How Will You Spend Your $13 Stimulus This Week?

As you might have guessed, this post is about the individual tax credit component of the stimulus plan that President Obama signed yesterday.  It will increase the size of the average weekly paycheck (for those earning less that $75,000 yearly) by $13.

Notice that the title of this post suggests that the $13 take-home pay bump will show up this week.  It won’t.  Estimates are that the tax credit won’t actually hit the payroll and withholding systems until June.   Why is that?
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Stimulus 2009: An Exclusive Fantasy Interview

I enjoyed interviewing myself so much yesterday that I’ve decided to conduct another interview.  This Q&A session is with a member of Congress who recently voted for the 2009 Stimulus plan. It is an exclusive interview that you can’t find anywhere else.  (That’s because I made it up.)   But you should read it anyway because even if our Congress people are not saying these things, they’re thinking them.  And even if they are not even thinking about some of these things, they should be.

Here is the actual transcript of the fantasy interview:

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Obama Pitches His Stimulus Plan – An Assessment

I tend not to watch Presidential press conferences because they too often are just left-over campaign speeches that have been condensed and re-packaged.    Nevertheless, I forced myself to watch President Obama’s press conference last night because it was his first as President but more important, it was his last and best opportunity to sell his stimulus plan to the American people.  This is my assessment of that attempt.

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Who Will Stimulate the other Economies?

As bad as things are in the U.S., other countries have it worse.  Some anecdotal evidence from around world:

Today, the Bank of England lowered its benchmark interest rate to 1%, the lowest its been since the bank was founded in 1694.  Economic experts expect the U.K. economy to shrink in 2009 at a rate faster than any year since 1946, and faster than any other industrialized country.  Inflation in the UK has dropped by 1% in a month (the fastest ever) is expected to fall well below the target rate of 2%.  To me, that is the most amazing statistic.  And get this:  To protest skyrocketing unemployment and fewer work hours, British workers have been staging walkouts at oil refineries and power plants.  Refusing to work because you don’t have enough work to do?  I’m missing the logic there. Read more

Time to Apply Financial History Lessons

On my drive in this morning, I heard a quote attributed to Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson.  In essence, he was commenting that current U.S. government efforts to stimulate our economy with enormous amounts of new spending and borrowing was simply passing debt-driven consumption from one set of trouble-makers (us) to a bigger troublemaker (the federal government).

I have to confess I had not heard of Niall Ferguson before this and was frankly surprised to hear such things being attributed to a professor at Harvard, a bastion of left wing academia.  (Full disclosure:  I am a Cornell grad and hockey fan and therefore a long-time hater of all things Crimson.)  So I did some research on this very interesting fellow. Read more

Income Re-Distribution Features of the 2009 Stimulus Plan

The AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT TAX ACT OF 2009 (a/k/a Obama stimulus plan) includes some new features by which income earned by some taxpayers will be re-distributed in the form of tax credits.  The income being re-distributed will go to other taxpayers and, in many cases, to individuals who are not taxpayers at all but merely tax return filers.

Here is a list of some of these credits, as identified in reports prepared by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation: Read more

Finding the Hard Truth on Your Federal Tax Burdens

If you are a taxpayer (and barely a majority of working adults are), we are in the midst of a “perfect tax storm.”  First, we have entered the traditional “tax season” where accountants (such as my sister) put in lots of extra hours preparing returns while trying to keep their clients honest.  

We are also in what Mr. ToughMoneyLove would call “stimulus season” where politicians and government economists are falling over each other trying to figure out (and explain to each other) how to use fiscal, monetary, and tax policies to stimulate the economy.

Thus, tax season + stimulus season = perfect tax storm. Read more

A Financial Advice Stimulus Plan?

Mr. ToughMoneyLove is surprised to report that the New York Times thinks like me, only three months delayed.  Yesterday, the Times published an opinion piece by a Yale economics professor proposing that the federal government launch a financial advice stimulus plan.  

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