Fourteen hundred dollars, Biden says. Bring it on. Prime the pump, as F.D.R. said of his efforts to lurch a crippled economy into sputtering and then chugging again.
But never mind the Keynesian macro view. How about the plain wisdom of Harrison Ford, pre-Han Solo, when he was still building decks and additions in the Southern California sun, invariably telling any balky or hesitant client, “Spend the bucks.”
Left unsaid: It’s what it’s there for. It’s only money.
The last stimulus round, in January, when $600 for each of us in a family of five poured electronically into my checking account seemingly minutes after the D.C. bureaucrats gave the high sign, put me in mind of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend I’d received in the late 1990s, gradually increasing over five years from $900 to $1,700 per, roughly speaking, before with some uncertainty I set foot back in the Lower 48.
Money for nothing, I guess you could call those checks. Once seen in the popular imagination as a kind of incentive to stay in the state (more like a remote territory or resource-rich colony, honestly) or venture there in the first place, they came out of an oil slush fund related to the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which despite the original controversy came to be pretty universally looked on with pride, and as a curiosity, an attraction, for visitors, though I’ll wager no one ever saw caribou rubbing up against it and having babies, as the old oilman George H.W. Bush once envisioned.
Those checks were an unalloyed good, whether blown, saved, or sent off to some impoverished relative. And if it was documented that debauchery increased the day after their arrival, the good times had been earned through the long, sunless winter.
I wish I could remember what I did with the money. Simply lived off it, I suppose, as I was then making 7 or 8 dollars an hour, which isn’t quite as close to the bone as it sounds, when in Fairbanks at the time you could rent a no-plumbing cabin with an outhouse for 300 bucks a month.
The dollars, in other words, went back into the local economy, just as was done in this shrewd plan enacted in Skagway in the second half of last year, when CARES Act stimulus money was redirected from municipal purposes to monthly payments to individuals — as long as it was spent in Skagway.
That’s the Alaska way, widely applicable.