“Have a cookie. You’ll feel right as rain.”

–The Oracle

That’s the Oracle’s answer to Neo in “the Matrix after telling him he is not ‘The One’.

In one of my moments of disconnected thinking, I realized we are all slaves to cookies, particularly this time of year.  You know what I am talking about:  The Girl Scouts.

One of my daughters was a Girl Scout and we sold those damn cookies for her every year.  And every year the pitch was and is the same:  Support the girls, buy the damn cookies. 

And we did.  We bought them for ourselves and plugged our friends, family, co workers and strangers on the street to buy more.

For some it was a dire competition.  The troop leader one year used her husband to drive her daughter’s sales through the roof, to get the grand prize:  A stuffed animal.  Cheaper to go buy the damn stuffed deer.  And the child learned nothing except that when your father is a Flight Engineer on a military cargo plane, he knows lots of people who will buy cookies.

We do love them.  Sure, occasionally the kind they sell changes, but we still love em, and we all have a favorite.  And every year we buy the sales pitch and buy the cookies.

We don’t need them mind you.  Particularly me, a slightly overweight guy with high blood pressure and lousy cholesterol.

But we love them.  They taste good, and they make us feel good, even if there is a price to pay (both now and later).

We love that we support the girls, even though in reality the Girl Scout troop only gets about 50¢ a box (it varies, historically it ranges from about 45¢ to $1).  Maybe you didn’t know that.  That $4 box of cookies get heavily eaten away by many groups and levels before the money trickles down to the actual GS troop.

But even so, that paltry 50¢ adds up when it is several hundred boxes sold.  So yes, it does help the troop to plan activities. 

So everyone wins.  They get a field trip or some other activity, the cookie maker makes money, the National GS Council gets royalties, and local councils get their cut and you get a tasty snack with no nutritional value to spoil your enjoyment with an added bonus of feeling good about it.  Too bad under normal circumstances they are not tax deductible.

But after all that history on Girl Scout Cookies, that is not the cookie I am waiting for.

The cookie I want is the IRS Tax Rebate Check.

You see, it is like a cookie in almost all respects.

First, like the Oracle, the Government is offering it to stimulate the economy, meaning they were worried that there are bad tidings, and they want to head it off with a boost.  I am no economist, but that still seems to me to be a no brainer.

Now, the benefit of The Cookie is money pumped into our economy.  This is a result of our spending the rebates on services and products and the money flowing slowly back to the government in the form of revenues and taxes.

You spend your $600 bucks and that provides employers with revenue, they pay salaries and taxes with it, the employees make money and pay income taxes on it, the manufacturers make profits and pay taxes on it, etc etc etc.

No, it is not quite a zero sum game mind you, some areas will falter and other grow.  It will have some affects that we can see, and the government reaps that benefit.  The government is betting the positives will outweigh the negatives.  I hope they are right.

But at the same time, like the GS cookies, some say there is a long term price in the mix too, because the money to pay to pump those rebates will eventually need to be alloted.  The piper must be paid some day.

But we don’t care.  We get a cookie, a bright shiny tasty yummy cookie.

And I want mine.

Even though I know that this cookie may have a long term price to be paid, I will spend it and feel good about doing my part to boost our economy.  I want my cookie. 

I can’t help it, I love cookies.  Too bad this cookie comes too late to buy those other cookies…

  Trackposted to Stop the ACLU, Outside the Beltway, Rosemary’s Thoughts, WayWard Fundamentalist Christian, Right Truth, DragonLady’s World, Shadowscope, InvestorBlogger, A Newt One-punking the global warming cult, Adeline and Hazel, Pursuing Holiness, Chuck’s Place, D equals S, Woman Honor Thyself, A Newt One- Coverage of Vets on the hill!, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Celebrity Smack, A Newt One- Don’t miss this show!, A Newt One, Dumb Ox Daily News, Rant it Up, Stageleft, Right Voices, A Blog For All, 123beta, Adam’s Blog, Maggie’s Notebook, The Christian Nationalist, Cao’s Blog, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Nuke Gingrich, Allie is Wired, McCain Blogs, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Oblogatory Anecdotes - Photoshop Montage/Open Trackbacks, Beagle Scout, Tilting At Windmill Farms, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS