All the up and down, small and large print on my posts are part of the "New and improved" format.  It's driving me nuts.  I apologize for it.

There is a storm coming in--it's started raining--and Squig has already started shaking.  My sweet little "Chicken" Dog.

I was trying to figure out what "stimulus" meant the other day.  I decided it was this:  Someone gets a dollar, spends it at the grocery store and the store gives 10 cents (more or less) of it in tax to the government.  The store has 90 cents left, buys chicken to sell and the chicken seller gets the 90 cent payment, pays 9 cents to the government in taxes and has 81 cents left to buy chicken feed.  

The feed store gets to keep 72-73 cents and pays 8 cents to the government in taxes.  The feed store has 65 cents left to pay the farmer that grows the grain to make the chicken feed, who has 58 cents left, to pay the farmer who pays the fertilizer company, hires someone to help cut the grain, buys a tractor and on and on and on.

It takes about 27 to 30 days before the government gets the entire dollar back from taxes. (Allowing for mathematical error?)  That's why they call it stimulus.  It only works if everyone spends it.  When you keep it, when you don't spend it, it's called something else.  So if you got a stimulus check and didn't spend it, you upset the apple-tax-cart.