im in ur walmartz, spendin yur tax dollarz.

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So the government is planning to carpet-bomb the electorate with tax refund checks, in the hopes that Mr. and Mrs. Sixpack are going to go out to MalWart and blow their windfall on a flat-panel TV or something. According to the article at CNN, it’ll be in the order of $600 per taxpayer and $1200 per couple, with an additional $300 for every child. For us, that would mean a $1800 check, but it would be a refund of our own damn money, so pardon me for not jumping up and down and thanking the folks in charge for their generosity. That’d be much like expressing gratitude to a mugger who takes your wallet and then gives you a $20 bill back so you can get a cab ride home.

Now, any time the government plans on returning some of our cash to us, I’m all for it. Part of me–the cynical, elitist part that some of you love so much–is kind of skeptical about the odds of reviving our $17 trillion economy by injecting a measly couple of billion into the market by way of rednecks buying Chinese-made shit at Wally World.  Oh, and they’re going to give the refund to everyone, including folks who didn’t pay any income taxes last year.  (Wouldn’t want Welfare Acres to rise up in riot for being left out when there are checks hitting the mailboxes in Suburbia for a change, would we?)

But, hey–whatever. If they go through with it, and we see $1800 in our mailbox by June, we’ll do exactly what they don’t want us to do, and stuff that check into the savings account to have in reserve, so we can weather the coming financial shitstorm.

Now, I’m not one of those people who blame all the evils of the world on the Chimperor, but maybe that stimulus package wouldn’t be necessary if we hadn’t turned a budget surplus into a huge deficit by chucking a half trillion dollars a year down that hole in the sand between Tigris and Euphrates for the last six years or so. The Conservatives have long since abandoned any fiscal restraint, and Dubya has racked up the national charge card to staggering amounts. I’m starting to think that the only thing worse than a tax-and-spend liberal is a borrow-and-spend conservative.

Alas, the government has been spending beyond our means for a long time now, and both parties are equally guilty. We’ve had decades of successive administrations and Congresses keep building up that fiscal house of cards while hoping (or knowing) that it’s not going to collapse before their retirement or death. In an age where two thirds of the federal budget goes to entitlement payouts, the way to curb spending is to cut those entitlements, and everyone drawing a paycheck on the Hill knows that it would be political death to even propose doing so. You try and cut the checks from Uncle Sugar, and come election time you have millions of screaming proles running to the polls to vote your ass out of office.

(The most powerful lobby in D.C. is the AARP, by the way, whose members largely refuse to do simple math and acknowledge the very obvious mathematical problem with Social Security and Medicare. They’ll wave their crutches and shout something about how it’s their money, and how they deserve to get back what they paid in…but who don’t give a rat’s ass about the GenX folks who will also pay in all their lives, only to be left holding the bag when they retire and the system has suffered fiscal collapse. I got mine, and I’ll be long dead when you can’t get yours, Sonny.)

The people who get to pay back the bill for all those “free” government checks are the ones like the two kids that are taking naps in their bedrooms as I type this, and they’re blissfully unaware of the fact that their government is borrowing money and promising to pay it back out of their future paychecks.

And that kind of pisses me off, to put it mildly.

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