Labor gives to the poor who spend it on alcohol and gambling which is highly taxed. The government then receives their handout back.

Liberal gives to the rich who expand business therefore people pay higher taxes. The government then receives their handout back.

I prefer the liberal approach. Either way the struggling poor arn’t helped.

That’s my $0.02 worth

But in reality; some sort of stimulus package targeting those worst affected is something we need. But you start to run into issues when you want those people to start spending it ‘wisely’. Imagine, for a minute, that there are three families;

# One with a father with a past drug issue where things are now on track
# One with an alcoholic father, whose alcoholism has never been reported
# One with neither issue

Now imagine, one of those families has a mortgage, one of them has crushing credit card debt and one of them has 6 kids.

Is it even possible to design a stimulus package that would pay out ‘wisely’? Or does each ‘condition’ you add to the money make things worse?

I strongly believe that there is a point at which we need to decide to do something to help as many people as we can, even if it makes things worse for a segment. We have programs to help addicts and people with gambling problems; if they don’t work, we should expand and fund them, or run them more effectively – but we shouldn’t use a whole different system with a whole different purpose to address issues they are ill suited to solving.

The measure of success for *this* program should be “is the economy better then it was before the package, with the minimum of side-effects?”.