I’ve heard and read several analyses of the govt’s plan to give Americans a check to stimulate the economy.  The point that several commentators made is that those checks are months away from being in our pockets, and that thus they may be just too late getting to us to have any real effect.  One senator who was claiming that he’d like to have seen a different package indicated that a “quick” stimulus to the economy would be if folks spent that money within 2 months of receiving it.  He also claimed that folks on the upper end of the income scale would likely save the money or use it to pay down debt, neither of which releases new funds into the economy.

I’ll go on the record as an American looking forward to her check in the mail: I think the effect on the economy will begin well before we actually receive those checks.  I already made some comment tonight that we could do something we otherwise wouldn’t, and just count it as borrowing against our rebate check.  If you think found money is coming, the economic doom and gloom outlook that otherwise would keep you from spending money suddenly lifts.  The money will come tomorrow (as in, the sun will come out…) and we can spend against it today.

Think about the timing: for folks who haven’t paid off whatever they charged for Christmas, the dollars will come in too late for them to earmark it for the responsible thing of paying off bills.  Similarly, they’re too late to apply towards any income tax owed, and too late to even tempt you to be responsible and fund a 2007 tax year IRA.  No, they’re just funds coming at a time when the general flow of funds has evened out.   Mentally, we don’t have to account them against anything.  So we can apply them towards dreaming, and getting tastes of those dreams now.  If we’re willing to pay credit card interest charges (and lots of us are, according to the credit card industry’s statistics, are), we can have that dream NOW and not even have to wait for the IRS machinery to mesh with the US postal service and deposit a paper check into our mailbox.

My odds are on those paper checks being already spent before they’re in the majority of American mailboxes.

If you schedule a 2 1/2 hour meeting with a very long agenda….  make sure that that’s the LAST meeting you have to schedule for a while.  Don’t cover point #1 in your agenda, and then note that we’ll need to have ongoing meetings to discuss the others.  I, uh, suddenly have dentist appointments every week JUST at the time when your regular meeting would be held. To help me feel less guilty, perhaps I’ll abstain from Novocaine…  it would still be less painful.

A thank you to my friend, Ken, for reminding me about the Freakonomics blog…  A quick peek over there today brought me to a theory positing why retirees build such big houses.  After all, rationally, most need less space, and have no real need to restart a mortgage. Worse, as my grandmother is finding out, dealing with a big house when your arthritis is acting up and your afraid of breaking a hip if you fall off of a ladder is no fun at all.

I’ll toss my theory into the ring, though, that a house is not a rational purchase.  We don’t buy homes to fulfill our need for housing.  We buy homes to fulfill our dreams of what our life could be like, in a particular area, or with a home that’s decorated a particular way or that has a certain kitchen layout.  We dream of things that we COULD do in a particular space, not of what we will do with our own particular sloppy habits or lack of time.

The homes that are going up in our area are massive.  The signs used to say things like “starting in the low 400s”.  I can’t say as I’ve seen one of those in a while, unless it’s associated with a townhouse: the numbers have definitely gone up.  This, in what is widely listed as a housing downturn.

We debate about buying a new home, or upgrading our own, for a combination of rational and dream lifestyle reasons.  We haven’t yet pinned down where the boundary between those lay, and what rationality versus dreams is worth to us.  The rational side says that when our kids get bigger, our house will need a bit more elbow room to handle those growing elbows.  I want a bigger seating area near the kitchen, so that we can have people over for dinner and not be pinned up against the glass sliding door.  And hey, if we’re going to expand out the back of the house (assuming we did an expansion), I’ve always dreamed of a bigger master bedroom with a nice master bathroom to boot.  What’s a little more renovation when you’re only dreaming of the tab?

A few years ago now we had our basement renovated.  We quickly discovered that tabs run up: we upgraded the lighting system downstairs, and then realized we needed to upgrade the electrical capacity in our home, and then discovered that to meet the new code we needed to install smoke alarms that were hooked into the electrical system upstairs, and THEN decided that since the electricians needed to run wiring up into the ceilings anyway, we’d have them install wiring for ceiling fans in each of the bedrooms.  Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.  And that was just for the basement.  Imagine rearranging a load bearing wall on the back of the house, adding the plumbing and installations to support a true master bathroom rather than our half bath, dealing with moving cabinets and lighting in the kitchen, and then matching things like siding (oh, we want to replace the siding, anyway: might as well throw it in the mix).

All of this to fulfill some dreams of what we MIGHT do in the house.  Note that none of my proposed renovations there really does anything to add too much more elbow room to the kids’ living area…  we sort of figure them having small rooms will just encourage them to be more involved with the family.  🙂

I’m impressed by Napster of late. They recently announced that users can now listen to every track in their catalog for free, up to five times. After five times, if you want to listen to it again, you need to either buy the track, or subscribe to one of Napster’s monthly services. In the meantime, as you’re listening to your free tracks online, you’re being exposed to various ads, whose revenue is then apparently shared with the music industry as its payment for the use of the free music. (Napster’s FAQ on its free music model is here.)
This seems to me to be a brilliant music model: the few second snippets offered in other music libraries are not enticing enough to cause me to browse to find new music which I might purchase from their stores. Napster, through use of this ability to listen for free, as well as its playlists, encourages me and makes it enjoyable to browse for those songs I would be willing to buy. No longer am I consciously shopping: I’m browsing, and impulse buying.

I wonder if the 5 listen limit is too high, actually. New songs only stay in popularity a short while. And there’s quite a breadth of material on Napster. Seems I could always be listening to new and interesting things, without ever really hitting the 5 song limit. Now, I’d need to be perpetually connected to an Internet connection, else I might want that song in my portable player. But I generally AM perpetually connected to an Internet connection… my portable player serves me at the gym, but not many other places. Napster might consider lowering that limit to 3… if I’m willing to listen to a song more than 3 times, I probably oughta pay for it…