You Was Gonna Get One of Them Foot Massagers
Today at work I overheard some people talking excitedly about the imminent arrival of their tax-rebate checks, and it made me kind of sick. Lookit, I could use the money too, but I still recognize that this whole business is a bunch of short-sighted bullshit that in the long run is going to dig us in deeper than we already are. Unless you truly plan to spend every dollar of your rebate on American-made goods, that money is wasted on you. That's money that the Treasury Department doesn't have, that they rolled the dice on giving to you hoping you'll use it to help "stimulate the economy." But you're not going to stimulate the economy; you're going to make a payment on the credit debt that you spend the other 364 days of the year pretending isn't there. And by the way, don't feel guilty about that. Because fuck this administration for asking us, with the increasingly dire financial messes in which so many of us find ourselves, to go buy more shit that we don't need. In fact, even if you can afford to spend your rebate at the mall, don't. Put it in your savings account. Don't give them what they want. George Bush giving everyone in America a Sharper Image gift certificate isn't going to fix our disaster of an economy, OK? So let's call it what it is: a bribe. It's a bribe that's going to make a nation of buffoons say, "Hey, that George Bush isn't so bad. He gave me $300! What a good guy!" It's an election year, everybody. These checks might as well come in envelopes stamped "Vote For The Status Quo."