Somebody actually did the research.

Yesterday, I was asking the current form of this question. This is data from the 2002 "tax rebate."

An October 2002 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research said that roughly 20 percent of Americans spent the checks. Nearly a third of the people who got checks saved or invested the refund, and the rest used it to pay off bills or debt.

Inexactly extrapolating forward, that would mean that roughly half of the $150 billion proposed cash giveaway would go directly to the debtholders.

I guess doing it this way is more election friendly than a $70 billion bailout to the mortgage and credit card companies.

From the NYTimes:

Personal tax rebates are intended to put cash in the hands of consumers, in the hope that they will spend it immediately, giving a lift to stores, service providers and manufacturers of consumer goods, rather than saving it or using it to pay down debt....

Joel Slemrod, professor of business economics at the University of Michigan, said his study of the 2001 tax rebates showed only 22 percent of taxpayers he surveyed spent most of their rebates.

So, of the $150 billion cash giveaway, only $30 billion goes to "the economy" itself.

My position then, as it is now, is that this "tax rebate" methodology isn't the most efficient way to get this money into the economy. It tends to go middle class and up while the poor and near poor get very little.

If you give somebody making $110,000 an extra $800, it will more or less end up on the pile. If you give it to someone making $40,000 or less, it will likely be spent immediately. Speaking from some experience, at $40,000 there's alot of pent up demand.