Bush pledges to give the economy a " shot in the arm." But will it work? Here are some views from conservative opinionmakers: Irwin M. Stelzer:
When all is said and done, it is not clear that a stimulus, even one totaling about $150 billion, will provide much of a lift to the sagging economy. Data on the effectiveness of Bush's attempts to boost the economy in the early days of his presidency are ambiguous. Some say that the recipients of the $600-per-family checks spent only a small portion of their windfall (if it is fair to characterize returning money to the people who earned it as a windfall), and that it was the cut in the marginal tax rate on high earners, and in taxes on dividends and capital gains that gave a fillip to an already-recovering economy. No matter. The proposed stimulus is not large enough to cause any real harm, and just might help the economy to right itself. Besides, no politician dares being seen as passive in the face of an economic downturn, lest he meet the fate of the president's father, whom Bill Clinton successfully portrayed as somewhere between detached from working-class people and hard-hearted.
[T]here is virtually no empirical evidence that tax rebates are an effective response to economic slowdowns. The increased personal saving doesn't help the economy because the federal budget deficit, which can be thought of as negative saving, offsets all of it in the aggregate. The main benefit of a tax rebate would seem to be political - giving politicians a way of appearing to be doing something about the nation's economic problems that is superficially plausible. A new rebate probably won't do much harm. But anyone who thinks it will prevent a recession - if one is actually in the pipeline, which is not at all certain - is dreaming.
There's no link, but on Special Report on Friday, Krauthammer made this observation: The tax rebates could (temporarily) offset the increase in gas prices paid by American consumers. Meanwhile, on the Newshour, David Brooks was skeptical that the stimulus would prove effective. But, as Stelzer points out, all this probably has more to do with election-year politics than substantive economic policy reform.