My Own Personal Stimulus Package

WARNING: If you're a daily reader of my blog, you might want to skip this one. I just reread it and even I think it's boring, and I wrote it! But I'm too lazy to write something else, so it's staying!

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I bought a house recently. I just wanted to give you a chance to thank me for that.

That's because it occurred to me that that's the kind of thing that is going to really get this economy going again. Not Henry Paulson. Not Obama's 850 billion dollar incentive package. House sales are what's going to get this economy rolling. Consider the following:

1. We put 20% of the purchase price down on the house. Some of that cash went into a bank and is now there for the bank to loan to others.
2. The former owner received a big fat check. A lot of that check went to pay off her previous mortgage (Money which that mortgage company can now lend to someone else) , but she kept a chunk of it, and I imagine that she used some of it to purchase Christmas presents or pay bills or maybe to put her children through college.
3. The two realtors involved each received a commission, which in times as tight as they currently are for realtors (and they both communicated that to me) they probably used that money to pay bills and, again, for Christmas.
4. We had a new roof put on the house, which kept two men employed for a week's worth of time.
5. We purchased a new refrigerator, range, dishwasher, hot water heater, and garbage disposal. Our purchases helped pay the salaries of the salesmen, the delivery men, the installers, and the factory workers who created the products, in addition to the truck drivers who delivered the products to the store, the stock person who loaded and unloaded the trucks, and many others. Each of the people who were paid for their work took that money and moved it back into the economy.
6. We've painted almost the entire inside of the house, spending quite a bit of money on paint. Again, a number of people received some money as a result of those multiple purchases.
7. Speaking of multiple purchases, I've spent more time at Home Depot and Lowe's in the last 6 weeks than in the previous six years. Again, everyone from salespeople to cashiers to janitors were paid to help me.

And all of those people, as I've mentioned above, took their money and (hopefully) made purchases of their own, and kept the economy rolling along.

In fact, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that our simple purchase of a house was its own sort of economic stimulus, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the economy.

But I can't keep doing this every month (Believe me! I really can't!). Our economic stimulus package, if we're going to have one, should make it easier for people to make big purchases like that.