Best Business Commentary

Our stimulus checks are coming, but surveys suggest that most of us won’t spend them, says Daniel Gross in Slate. The world’s middle class is growing fast, says Moises Naim in the Los Angeles Times, and there’s a price we pay.

Stimulating lies

Our stimulus checks are coming, but surveys suggest that most of us won’t spend them, says Daniel Gross in Slate. If that’s true, “the stimulus will be less than stimulating.” Luckily for the economy, though, most respondents are probably lying. A large majority of Americans had said they would save or invest their tax rebates before the 2001 stimulus, too, but a study of post-rebate spending “discovered that Americans were either lying to pollsters or simply unable to control themselves.” That’s “the good news.” But there’s bad news, too: if the 2001 stimulus is any guide, its 2008 successor “may not deliver the immediate jolt that we hope it will.”

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