This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 18th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

To stave off a recession, both President Bush and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are getting

behind a fiscal stimulus package.

The price tag for juicing the economy could top $100 billion.

Chris Edwards, the Cato Institute's Director of Tax Policy Studies, says that money is really just a quick cash

advance on taxes Americans have yet to pay.

Well in recent months the economy seems to have slowed down quite a bit and Washington policy makers and pundits are jumping all over this as an excuse to sort of do something and to supposedly stimulate the national economy so that it doesn't slip into

recession.

According to Wall Street Journal, Congressional leaders in both parties met in recent days to

craft that package.

They say specific plans vary. The expected tab is expected

to be in the range of $100 billion. That's right. You don't have to encourage politicians

very hard to get them to spend more money and frankly the

slowdown in the economy is being used as an excuse to fashion an old-fashioned Keynesian

style spending plan of about a hundred billion dollars

congressional leaders in the White House are thinking about to simply mail checks to

Americans, Americans who get food stamps, Americans who are unemployed, or frankly every American is one idea.

They would just mail them checks and hope that they went to spend the money, spend the money in the economy, and they believe

that this is good for American economic growth.

I think the whole idea is kind of crackpot and was discredited in the 1970s when we

scrapped when we tried Keynesianism and the whole Reagan revolution was

...