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Today, President Bush signed the $168 billion stimulus package that has received much coverage in its bipartisan pursuit to address the economic slowdown with more spending. From the AFP:

Treasury officials say tax rebate checks of up to 600 dollars for individual taxpayers and 1,200 for couples, plus 300 dollars for dependent children, could boost consumer spending which has been pressured by sinking home prices and tight credit.
The White House said the package will provide tax rebates to 128 million American households and that the first checks should arrive in mailboxes in May.

Of course the signing is not much of a surprise, but I would also like to use this post to make a valuable addition to the Coalition Against Stimulus. John Stossel, who conveys free market ideas to a wide audience like no other member of the media, joins the club with an article, “Stimulating Nonsense,” released today.

He envokes Russ Roberts, as several have, who had perhaps the most the most memorable line of the anti-stimulus campaign:

It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing—the water in the shallow end doesn’t get any deeper.

In other words this bill will (a) not augment gross product in any way and (b) all it does is redistribute money from one place to another–rich to lower/middle class; savings to consumption. If anything, from what we know about the effect of redistribution on economic incentives as well as the importance of savings to economic growth, “stimulus” will do anything but stimulate overall.

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The Bush Signs Stimulus Package, The Coaltition Against Spending Grows by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.