Oh, Boy! Let’s Spend Ourselves Into a Hole Again
What do you know. It’s true, after all.
The check really is in the mail. And they really are from the government, and they’re here to help us.
Two of the three big lies, put to lie right there. It says so on IRS notice 1275: “We are pleased to inform you . . . you will be receiving a check.” It must be true. The IRS never jokes about money.
Next week, I expect the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny to call a joint news conference to announce that their friend Spider-Man has agreed to head up the nation’s new missile defense shield system.
And President George W. Bush, the engineer on this gravy train, gets a double dose of hallelujahs: from that “you may already be a winner” IRS letter putting his name into 95 million mailboxes, and then again when the checks start arriving this week.
It’s Christmas in July, and Alan “The Grinch” Greenspan has revealed that deep down, he really has heart of gold and a MasterCard to match.
It’ll be a $38-billion jolt of adrenaline to the economy and a jolt of heroin to this stuff-addicted country. The retailers are primed, expecting a run on DVD players and video-game consoles and Hawaiian vacations. Wal-Mart will cash your rebate check right there in the store. The men who head the Gap and Home Depot, who in April paid good money for a full-page ad in a Capitol Hill newspaper lashing Congress to pass the whole tax deal, will get their advertising budget back and then some.
If it’s hard to buy American anymore, what with NAFTA and globalization and all, you can still spend like an American:
* Park your rear in the driver’s seat of an SUV as big as a velociraptor and just as rapacious--maybe a big ol’ top-of-the line Japanese-made model, just to show the Japanese how much we appreciate their nit-picking on the Kyoto Accord to give us some cover.
* Blow it all on gas for the SUV you already drive. Show the president and his friends that you too believe that no tree that ever grew in the Tongass National Forest was as pretty a sight to look upon as an oil rig at work.
* Donate money to Strom Thurmond’s reelection. Or just donate blood to Strom Thurmond.
There are Americans--and I’ve heard from some of them of late--who are inclined to think that cashing this check and throwing around dollars like a sailor on shore leave is the act of a co-conspirator, making them party to a tax plan they believe bears no more resemblance to real reform than the Universal back lot does to a real town.
These people are figuring out how to put that money where it will do the most good, to undo the harm of it. There are many worthy beneficiaries. Bill Gates and his fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and George Soros, who took out newspaper ads saying they wanted no part of the repeal of the estate tax, could endorse their $600 checks over to a needle-exchange program, legal aid for the poor, animal welfare, family planning projects, after-school reading programs. They could make a donation, and make a point:
* Play government in reverse. Instead of handing out investment write-offs to the moneybags, hand out 10-spots on the midtown bus to the people who earn their money by the hour, not by the dividend or residual check.
* Bail a WTO protester out of jail.
* Support solar energy (at least until some bright boy figures out a way to make sunlight a proprietary and profitable trade secret).
* Donate to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Texas chapter.
* Buy copies of ex-Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book “The Betrayal of America,” an indictment of the 2000 presidential election, and mail them all to the Supreme Court.
* Donate to Sen. Jim Jeffords’ reelection campaign. Or just buy a lot of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, to keep Vermont green.
Everyone agrees on two of the three big lies. The third varies from speaker to speaker. But for the purposes of this telling, let’s say the third big lie is that “The check in the mail” is an unalloyed Good Thing.
We tried this tax rebate before, here in California. In 1987, then-Gov. George Deukmejian sent out Christmastime rebate checks as big as $272. The word went out at the same time as the checks that the billion-dollar give-back would have paid for two teachers and two textbooks per student at every elementary, junior and senior high in the state. Gray Davis, then the state controller, endorsed his $272 over to the local schools. So did an assemblyman named Tom Hayden, and his wife, an actress named Jane Fonda.
And within a year, the state fell down a rabbit hole, tumbling toward a deficit almost exactly the same size as the refund checks.
Welcome back to Wonderland.
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
