Economic Stimulus

I get the economic stimulus package Congress is debating. Consumer spending is a ridiculously large portion of the Gross Domestic Product, the number people like to throw around to indicate the relative economic health of countries. Over 70% of the dollars traded in the United States come from consumer spending. So you pump $146 BILLION dollars into people's pockets, suddenly there's a bunch of those 50" t.v.s leaving Best Buy, and the economic heartbeat of our country gets resuscitated. It makes sense. But to me it's a sick kind of sense. We're injecting adrenaline into a patient that needs brain surgery. I've got two problems with the discussion. 1. The House version of the stimulus package gives a check to households making up to $150,000 and the draft version being debated in the Senate is for households making twice that much. I don't know, that just sounds wrong. Personally, I'm going to use the money to pay down credit cards bills. That's consumption that's already taken place, not the new consumption needed to keep the boat afloat. I'd rather see the cap on household income at $50 or $60 thousand and for about twice as much per household than is reflected in the House version (around $1,600 for a family of four). Two or three grand in a household that make up to just past living wages would buy a lot of stuff. But still, those families carry a tremendous amount of debt and I'd have to advise that they use the windfall to pay that debt down. Which leads me to my second problem with the economic stimulus discussion. It seems to me that rabid consumerism may have something to do with the problem. We have established an expectation that we should all get all the stuff we can while we can, debt be damned, as if there is no consequence for the trillions of dollars that are being spent on credit. This is money that doesn't exist. It's no surprise that Congress is pushing a package that legitimizes our every desire when they've been spending trillions of imaginary dollars for years. Guess who the creditor for the U.S. is . . . China. No kidding. But I digress. Seems to me our government ought to be telling us to tighten our belts a little, drive our cars a little less, perhaps even get out of our houses and help out our neighbors when they're in need. I know I'm all over the place on this one but imagine what $146 billion dollars could buy if only we were thinking about an investment in the future rather than a quick fix. Heck, just $7 billion added to the Head Start allocation would fund Head Start for every eligible child in the country. We could put countless thousands through college, draw the best teachers to inner-city schools, create venture capital for a whole new breed of entrepreneurs, create birth funds that virtually guarantee that no child would need to live in poverty, or link even the most rural parts of our country with broadband internet access (the U.S. is like 33rd in overall broadband coverage) , creating commerce opportunities we can only dream of.
I could go on and on. There are lots of things better to invest in than just telling the public "everything is okay, just keep spending money." Like I said though, I really do get the concept. It just leaves me feeling a little queasy and shallow. Anyway, I think I'll go think of other ways to spend my money.