The checks are in the mail! Oh yes? How nice. Soon we will all get some of our own money back in the form of a tax rebate from Uncle Sam. We are told that this rebate is designed to stimulate the sagging US economy. (Now there’s an alarming visual!)

Here are a few eensy problems with this ‘gift’ you may or may not be aware of:

• We had to borrow the money from China to get the check in the mail.
• If you filed your taxes with a third party tax preparer it may be delayed.
• If you are on social security and get your check direct deposited, you won’t get your tax rebate that way unless you filled out an additional form in which you provided your routing and account numbers, even though the government already has them. You’ll be mailed a check.
• If your total tax liability was less than $600 you won’t get $600 back, your rebate will be reduced.
• By the time we all get these rebates all of it will be going directly into our gas tanks.

You can find a table showing when you can expect your rebate check at the IRS website www.irs.gov. You can also use their online calculator to figure out exactly how much you will get. Most people will receive $600. Most married couples will receive $1200. Married couples with dependent children will receive an additional $300 per child.

If you owe money to the IRS, they will keep your rebate, apply it to what you owe, and send you a letter about what they did and why they did it in lieu of a check. You probably already knew that. If you live on your social security check and did not file a 2007 tax return because you have no other income, you will get nothing. You have to file a 2007 tax return, even if you had no income in 2007, to get the rebate. If you live on social security and have not done this, you will not receive a rebate.

The whole mess makes me really cranky.

You may be thinking right about now, “What kind of curmudgeon could possibly be against free money from the IRS?” This kind of curmudgeon, that’s what kind. Sure, I will take the money. I’m not going to send it back. But the cost of this stunt is astronomical and the impact on the country’s financial problems is sure to be minimal or even negative.

Putting $300-$600 in every taxpayer’s pocket in this economy is like leaving a quarter tip in a restaurant and telling the waitress, “Now go out and get yourself something nice with that, honey.” Remember all the great stuff you bought with the last tax rebate from the Bush administration?

Me neither.

As usual, no one is calling Pam asking for her opinion on how to solve the current economic mess. I totally understand why not. But if they were calling me, here are a few of the requests I would make:

Help people at the bottom who are losing their homes due to the subprime mortgage crisis. Our judgmental attitude toward homeowners impacted by this mess is hurting the entire economy. Why repossess homes that can’t be sold at any price because a) loans are hard to get and b) few people have the money to buy right now? What good are vacant overvalued properties to anyone? Look at the mess Cleveland is in right now with empty foreclosed properties destroying whole neighborhoods, eroding the tax base, and driving home prices down ever lower month to month. Bernanke’s ‘ain’t-gonna-happen’ solution involves requiring banks to rework the mortgages on foreclosed properties by reducing the principal until it is in line with real values is the right one here. It ain’t gonna happen, but it is the right solution.

Jobs, we need good jobs. Oh, and we also need good jobs. Good jobs would help too. And another thing that would help is good jobs. Yes, we only lost 20,000 jobs in April instead of the anticipated 80,000. Hello? No matter how delirious Wall Street may be about that news, this is not cause for celebration for the little people down here who actually rely on these lost jobs for our livelihood.

Will somebody please slap together a sound energy policy? Because right now, we don’t have one. We needed an aggressive, proactive renewable energy policy about, oh, thirty years ago, and now that we are watching oil prices leap off the charts and food prices leap right behind behind them, what do we get? A call to repeal the gas tax for three months and make the oil companies pay it. That will not do much for our falling-down bridges, pot-holed highways, and crumbling infrastructure, but it will save us from having to actually think and make intelligent changes to the way we live. Oh, and after driving up demand and hence, prices, it will save the average driver almost nothing.

No doubt some people will go out and buy new TVs or washing machines with their tax rebates, but my sense is that an awful lot of people will pay last month’s mortgage payment, catch up on the overdue utility bills, buy staples in bulk at Costco, pay down unsecured debt, or put the money in savings. It isn’t wrong or bad to blow tax rebate money on a flat screen TV. Each one of us getting those rebates has earned that money, so we can certainly use it as we please. What bothers me is that this money is being offered in place of responsible government fiscal policy. “Go out and spend,” is not fiscal policy. We can’t be the spenders of the free world unless we have good jobs providing real services or products and a government with an eye on the future and our real energy needs.

It’s obvious that we don’t have anything even close to that right now. That being the case, these checks, welcome as they are, are not designed to stimulate anything, not really. The checks are just a lame attempt to stave off the next major financial crisis until this administration has left Washington for good, and can watch the fall of the American financial empire from one of their many vacation homes.

Seriously, it never was their problem, was it?