I agree with you on this. They're ostensibly to help people afford to buy more gasoline. We should let the high gas prices change behavior instead.
> drop student debt forgiveness nonsense.
Not sure I agree with you on this. While I don't think it would be a great idea to forgive all student debt, I think a targeted forgiveness (under certain income/net worth threshold) of some student debt makes sense.
Yeah, quit their jobs to save money on the commute.
If they’re giving out stimulus, they must be getting it from tax payers, right?
The whole point of an independent central bank is that the fiscal authority (Congress) cannot print money out of thin air to monetize spending, either; monetary policy is based on macroeconomic conditions, not fiscal demands.
OTOH, the federal government inherently has a much lower cost of borrowing than the states, and California, like many (almost all, I think, though the details vary) has a State Constitutional requirement for a balanced operating budget and effectively relies on federal deficit spending for countercyclical spending.
> If they’re giving out stimulus, they must be getting it from tax payers, right?
Yes, the inflation relief tax rebate is paid out of current tax revenue (in fact, it is a plan to fulfill a constitutional mandate to return surplus tax revenue beyond a certain spending limit if not spent on education and infrastructure) and is not characterized as “stimulus”, contrary to the upthread misrepresentation. It's redistribution which probably has a very slight stimulative (and thus inflationary) effect because it goes to people with a higher propensity to spend in the domestic economy, per marginal dollar, than those it comes from, in order to relieve more of the impacts of inflation at the lower end of the income distribution.
California is not giving out anything called stimulus payments. You seem to be referring to the inflation relief tax rebate which is the system that has been adopted to return tax revenue that exceeds the Constitutional cap on state spending (FY 1978-1979 spending adjusted for population and inflation), because of the enormous revenue windfall the state has received in the post-COVID boom (and that cap takes into account inflation, so this is even with the high inflation.)
California neither increased taxes nor got favoritism in federal stimulus, so that's not why it is doing outstandingly well in fiscal terms. It just manages it's economy better and so has GDP growth that consistently outstrips the national average (usually, it also gets hit harder in the brief GDP drops, but that wasn't the case with COVID—perhaps because California’s GDP is more reliant on remote-compatible work.) See, e.g. https://united-states.reaproject.org/analysis/comparative-tr...
It did cut spending during the COVID downturn, which might have affected surplus numbers, but wouldn't have any impact on revenue overshooting the Gann Limit.
> That aside, why give money straight into people's pocket who will go out and spend it (foolishly) and thus increase inflation?
Because the very slight effect of the redistribution on expected overall inflation is much less than the expected effect it has in mitigating the impact of inflation on lower-to-high-middle income earners, especially lower income.
Not last time I checked. I work at a FANG and am definitely not low income yet my wife and I will be getting a few hundred.
If you don’t think this is to help keep politician’s in office (Gavin) you aren’t paying attention and being naive.
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/taxes/state-stimulus-c...