Like me, most of you probably got a recent notice in the mail reading something like: “We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which provides for economic stimulus payments to be made to over 130 million American households. Under this new law, you may be entitled to a payment of up to $600 ($1,200 if filing a joint return), plus additional amounts for each qualifying child.”
Outside of this, the notice doesn’t contain a lot of information. You don’t get to know how much, exactly, you’ll be getting or even when, specifically, the IRS will be sending the checks out. All it contains is a hardy pat on the back for Congress and the President for sending us all a check.
And how much did that pat on the back cost us? $42 million. But that $42 million is just the beginning of what these checks are costing us. It is apparently going to cost another $200 million to mail the checks themselves.
The total cost of publicizing taxpayer eligibility for economic stimulus rebates and processing the checks themselves will be around $200 million, Internal Revenue Service officials said March 27, but they continued to defend their outreach efforts, saying they want to do the right thing by taxpayers and they see it as an opportunity to promote a better image for the IRS.
In kicking off “Super Saturday” at a news conference, Richard Byrd, Internal Revenue Service commissioner for the Wage & Investment Division, said IRS sees the situation as an opportunity to work with the public in a positive way.
The Tax Foundation adds:
Postal Service and IRS employment is certainly being stimulated. $200 million would have bought 74 Super Bowl commercials, which is more than the 63 that were shown at the last Super Bowl. In fact, Fox’s total ad earnings on the Super Bowl, the four-hour pregame, and the special episode of House after the game, was only $225 million. The IRS could have bought the whole bloc of programming for what it’s spending.
Only the federal government could manage to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and call it a “tax rebate.”
Something else that is interesting is the language used in the communication from the IRS. Notice that the IRS are calling these checks an “economic stimulus payment,” which is actually the correct term. “Rebate” implies that one is getting money back, but a lot of the people receiving these checks didn’t pay anything into the federal government in the first place.
Instead, they really are getting a “payment” from the politicians in DC who are apparently trying to buy their way into our good graces.