I meant to post about George Bush’s $400 Child tax credit check which arrived in the mail last month. But the truth is that it has so profoundly transformed my life for the better that I just haven’t had any time to tell you about it until now.
A U.S. Treasury representative called to tell me that President Bush had intended to deliver the check to me personally, but at the very last moment he and Dick (Cheney) were called to a special White House seance/session to channel the spirit of Ronald Reagan. So George asked my mail man to deliver the check in his stead. I was honored.
I’ve been thinking for the past month how I should spend the money to help the U.S. economy. After all, our President tells us that by using this money to “buy American” we will help turn around our economy and I really want to help in whatever way I can. My wife and I were thinking of all the ways we could do that: putting a partial down payment on that Hummer we’ve had our eye on ($400 doesn’t go very far); or a partial deposit on the purchase of that U.S. manufacturing plant that had been planning to relocate to some sweatshop in Trinidad or Tobago. We’d like to help, we really would.
But after much thought, we thought we’d divvy up the money in small increments so it would do more good. We’d also get together some of our friends who also got child credit checks and pool our money to fund a year’s salary for a kindergarten teacher or maybe a social worker or a police officer or a nurse or a librarian. But then I hit my head in shock when I realized that that’s what taxes are in effect–citizens pooling their resources to do something to help make things better. And I realized that our checks WERE the funds the federal and state governments would’ve used to create these positions to begin with.
Now, we don’t know what we should do. We’re going down to see our Hummer dealer tomorrow. Maybe he’ll have the answer in the form of a brilliant, gleaming new Hummer. Now, that’s a patriotic statement we’re not ashamed to make!
This post owes a debt to Andy Borowitz’ brilliant piece of political satire about the earlier Bush tax cut in a May New York Times Op-Ed column, I am Set for Life. Read it and weep [with laughter]. Well, maybe not weep, but you will laugh pretty hard.
