I received my economic stimulus check yesterday.

As a conservative, I’m usually among the first to advocate lower taxes.  My single biggest problem with the Democrats is the redistribution of wealth socialist mentality that pervades that party.  Lower taxes means more economic freedom.  Less government involvement means more competition.  Both are vitally important to a healthy capitalist system – and let’s make no bones about it, capitalism is a guiding principle of our way of life.

But the economic stimulus checks dolled out by the President are nothing less than the bastard poster children for government waste.

Make no mistake, lowering taxes is a good thing.  We all want more money in our pocket, but we have to look at this from a realistic perspective.  If you are $15000 in debt, you cannot just go out and buy a new hand bag because you want one.  If you cannot afford your mortgage payment, you don’t go out and buy a new television.  If you owe six months of back child support, you don’t go buy yourself a new computer.  If you don’t have it in the budget, you cannot afford it.

The United States government is 10 trillion dollars in debt.

That is more than $30,000 per person.  I’ll let that sink in a minute.  Have it?  Now here’s the bad news: that’s just the “on the books” debt.  Just like Enron, we have more debt off the books with loans, contingencies, and emergency spending not covered in the official budget.  Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security’s unfunded mandates amount to an estimated 60 trillion dollars of “where the hell are we supposed to get the funding for this?”

In 2007, the government collected 2,568 billion dollars in tax revenues.  We officially spent 2,730 billion.  The Economic Stimulus Act cost the government another $170 billion dollars.

We will never be able to lower taxes if we keep spending money like this.  Ever. In fact, the simple reality of the situation is, unless we can reign in spending, the fiscally responsible thing to do would be to raise taxes.

Do you want your taxes raised?  No?  Good.  Neither do I.  We need to reduce spending.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Economic Stimulus Act was a needed measure that helped American families out in their time of need and that the American economy needed the cash.  I’ll go along with that argument.  I might even sympathize with it somewhere deep in my heart of hearts.

Someone please explain to me how, in a government run by a congress consisting of 535 people each with their own staff, a presidential bureaucracy of supposed experts, and thousands of lobbyists, we settled on distributing this money in the least efficient method humanly imaginable.

In February, I received a letter from the treasury.  It said I was going to get a check in the mail after I sent in my tax return.  In late March, when I started putting together my tax return, on the form it had a little formula that told me what I could expect to receive after I mailed it in.  In early April I mailed the government a rather substantial check.  Here it is in June, and I get a check back from them.

That’s all well and good, but let’s think about that for a second: Instead of just letting me write $600 off my return, I had to mail in a check for the full amount due in taxes.  Some guy in an office somewhere had to process my return, do the paperwork to send me my stimulus check, and then the government paid postage to have a second check mailed back to me six weeks after I sent in my return and six months after we all knew it was coming.

The government could have saved $150,000 in postage alone, and gotten the money to people six weeks earlier right then and there by just giving us a tax credit instead of a stimulus check.  God only knows how much money was spent in bureaucracy deciding who gets how much instead of letting us figure it out for ourselves.

Yes, people get tax refunds too, but you don’t need to send them two checks.  Send them one.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sit down and figure out, “okay, his refund is X, we’re going to send him X+600.”

And all of that doesn’t take into consideration the fact that whenever you send checks out in the mail, unscrupulous people will take advantage of the situation and steal the obviously marked Department of the Treasury Financial Management Service envelopes.  If your check goes missing and is not cashed you can fill out forms and send them in to ask them to stop payment and send you a new check.  If it was stolen and cashed by someone else, it is unclear if you’ll ever see your check.  At the very least it takes a minimum of 120 days for fraud investigations to begin, and then it is still uncertain as to whether or not you will ever get your check.

If someone does steal your check and you do not get a new one sent to you, you are out 600 bucks.  If you do, the American tax payer is out 600 bucks.  Talk about a win-win situation.

Look folks, this is the bottom line: America does not have the money to throw $170 billion around.  Even if, by some fluke, you cannot see that or if by some arcane calculation you decide it is worth it to inject money into the economy, just blindly sending out checks is probably one of the worst ways to do it.

Want to put money in my pocket?  Cut my taxes.  Want to cut my taxes?  Put an end to the ridiculous spending that is going on in Washington.

Financial responsibility.  Common sense.  Please give me some