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I know of a number of people who were spurred into purchasing their first house with the tax incentive. This is children of friends, of course since people our age have usually owned a house before.

I don't know of any cars specifically but again my friend's cars don't qualify as clunkers.

The report on which companies are getting stimulus money is supposed to be published on recovery.gov today.

I have a niece that bought a home under the home incentive. A realtor friend seemed to like the program and closed several sales under the program. Money wise I think municipalities and cities will get the big chunk rather than individuals.

Whether got got a stimulus or not. I don't believe anything is for free so I think there's a catch somewhere down the road. We shall see. Is an incentive really an incentive and a sale a sale!

The Wife gets and extra $25 bucks a week....on Her Unemployment!

Yeah - that extra $25 on my unemployment check is just wonderful. People may be buying houses because of the $8000 credit but most of them are houses that have been foreclosed on or are priced well below the tax assesed value. I used to work for a home construction company and they only built 5 houses last year and 3 so far this year. One guy came in with a plan of a house that cost $600,000 to build but he only wanted it done for only $350,000. I don't believe the figures that are on recovery.gov because they have already stated that some of the numbers were quoted twice or were not really created/saved jobs because of the stimulus due to the wrong criteria was used.

The programs are pretty much designed to minimize the impact of the economic meltdown and not so much as a magical replacement of a bad economy with a good one. The economic collapse that occurred in the last 6 months of 2008 may take a decade to recover from and hopefully it will bring back more srutiny of our financial and corporate institutions. But I suspect people will soon forget about criminal financial schemes, bad loan deals , and the Enron like corporatocracy and go back to fretting about the beer tax or what Favre is doing, and of course anticipating the next Elvis sighting.

But where are all the jobs that were promised? I know of no one who was spurred into purchasing their first house, but I did see that the housing market did get a bit better. I know people who traded their clunkers in and got new imports, and now the car industry will take a new hit because no one is getting any incentives to buy new cars. I know more and more people who are losing their jobs. The only people spending money around here (Florida) are governments -- we're supposed to believe that government programs will spur the economy, but that just isn't the way it works. Our little town is building a new beautiful water fountain in front of city hall - great! A very small group of people is working on it, and I'm sure none of them live in our community. The prosecutor's office has been forcing experienced attorneys out and hiring cheaper, young attorneys -- that doesn't help the economy at all. Other businesses around here are laying off people and working the ones they have to the bone. I'm self-employed and my business has dwindled a lot because people just don't have any money these days. Credit card companies have cut off the credit lines for good customers as well as bad, so people have less of a resource to call upon if they need some emergency funds.

Bottom line is that I've personally seen no direct effect from the spending of billions of taxpayer funds -- the banks that got the money aren't lending it, or have put such tight restrictions on it that no one qualifies for loans. Many of those who don't qualify are people who would have qualified but for the same financial institutions cutting the credit lines or raising interest rates just to improve their bottom line. They have cut off their noses to spite their faces. The government is limiting bonuses and salaries of people in the financial market who are best positioned to improve the health of that industry - so the gov't is holding that industry at bay and pretending to help them where in fact all the gov't is doing is strapping the financial institutions and not allowing them to do business and then blaming it on the banks!

Then there's healthcare reform -- oh, just don't get me started on that one. We all know we need reform, but the HOW is the real question.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. OldMike is indeed wise. I've nothing to add other than the fact that I get a kick out of how the mainstream media is trying to convince us the recession is over. Huh????

The unlimited compensation and severance packages were all the rage leading up to the economic meltdown so I am unclear as to how they will revive the economy. Remember one of the biggest: $210 million went to a man fired for doing a poor job! Two hundred and ten million could have provided a lot of jobs.

Embattled Chief Executive Resigns at Home Depot
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: January 3, 2007
Robert L. Nardelli, the chief executive of Home Depot, who came under heavy criticism for his pay package and failure to lift the chain’s stagnant stock price, has abruptly resigned, the company said today.

In its statement, Home Depot said that Mr. Nardelli and the company’s board “mutually agreed that Nardelli would leave his position.”

He will receive about $210 million in compensation from the company, including the current value of retirement and other benefits he was already entitled to, the statement said.
Full Story at: view link

You really need to step back and look at the big picture -- 210 million dollars to one guy did not cause the economic crisis, and I don't believe that it really contributed to it all. Might be bad business to pay a loser that much money, but to blame our current economic situation on that is folly. Sorry to sound confrontational. Also, no one can point to one single place where the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that has been given away by the current administration has actually helped anyone or even slowed or cured the economic decline. In fact, the current news seems to indicate that the expenditures did little or nothing to help. There's no telling what would have happened without it, but if the banks were too big to fail, then they probably would not have failed. The gov't gave away our money without our consent, and now are trying to control an industry that they no nothing about.