bamatone.net

Original URL: http://bamatone.livejournal.com/274828.html

From Real Time Economics blog on wsj.com:

The stimulus bill that President Obama signed Tuesday includes $116 billion in tax credits that will come largely through reduced tax withholding from paychecks, over two years. That will put $8 a week into most American’s paychecks. So if you’re getting an extra $8 each week, and as a good citizen you want to do your part to get the economy going, what should you spend the money on, and why? We took a quick survey of economists to find out.

There are the usual suggestions by readers: save it for three weeks and go to a sit down restaurant (helping both the restaurant and server), invest it in something (like an economics book, ha), get a haircut, donate it to a soup kitchen, etc.

But then Tyler Cowen from George Mason Univ. gives his two cents:

In my view, fixing the banking sector is more important than getting the stimulus right. So if you can afford to lose the money, go to a large bank (more likely to be insolvent), find their most overpriced service, and buy as much of it as you can. That way you are doing your part to recapitalize our banking system.

If you're stuck for ideas, just keep on using ATM machines, owned by other banks, so you can pay large fees to take out small sums of money from your checking account. When you need to, take all of your withdrawals and deposit them back in the account once again and start all over with the process.

There are only two possible explanations for this advice. 1) He's joking and is now laughing his ass off that it was actually "printed" in the WSJ blog. 2) He's being serious.

If the former, ha. (But irresponsible since many readers will take him seriously.)

If the latter (and I am convinced this is the case), omgwtfbbq. Gigantic facepalm moment, ladies and gentlemen.