$2300. That is how much money every single man, woman, and child would get if the $700 Billion slotted to giving thousands to millionaires and millions to billionaires were equally distributed among everyone NOT making more than $250,000 a year. Put that in your poll and ask people what they want! (Look below the fold for how I computed this).
My point is, if we're going to add $700 Billion to the deficit, it makes a lot more sense to give it to people who need it, will spend it, and will spend it in this country.
If you were to frontload this money into the first two years of the next 10 (federal budget dollars are always spread over 10 years), voilà, you have a second stimulus, which would make total stimulus dollars add up to $1.4 Trillion which is where it would have been had people like Christine Romer and Paul Krugman said it should have been in the first place. And this time, send checks and make sure Barack Obama's name is on them. Sound like class warfare? Damn straight!
Of course, except for Paul Krugman, the conventional wisdom is that we "can't" add more to the deficit by helping poor people or middle class people, but only by helping rich people - rich people who had their chance in the last 10 years to create jobs with it, and didn't. Instead, what they did was invest it, got richer by investing a lot of it in other countries, and shipped millions of our jobs overseas. Maybe, this time, if we prostrate ourselves before our overlords and beg, "please, we don't want you to feel 'uncertain' or unappreciated!" - maybe it will be different this time....
Still, it's hopeless to argue that we should increase the budget by $700 Billion. But hopefully, this little back-of-the-envelope calculation is a simple way of getting the point across as to how this budget argument translates to ordinary Americans. The less you make, the more this amount of money means to you, the more this argument should hit home.
Which makes me add that as my husband and I were discussing this, he said Obama should use his ability to reach all the American people: "He has the bully puppet... I mean, bully pulpit. Actually, what he needs is a Bully Puppet!" POW!
Calculation. There are 308 million Americans. Two percent are from households making more than $250K a year. Therefore 302 million individuals (98% of 308) come from households making less.
$700 billion divided by 302 million is $2,300.
Small amounts of rounding are allowed.
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PS My husband and I make more than 250K/yr.