Shawn Vallery's Ideas

by ConiAnn from Ohio

First, some background about Shawn. She and her husband, Paul, took time out of their busy tax season to fill out IRS forms for senior citizens - free! And they did this at the local grocery store, Foutty's Rittman IGA, so it would be convenient AND help increase awareness of the great job the new owners are doing (we were without a grocery store for awhile, that's another story).  By taking care of those 100 forms for those who usually didn't file, the Vallerys in effect gave the city a grant.

When Shawn received a sales flyer for 2-foot by 3-foot cling window signs, she didn't just toss it. Even though her busy season would be over by the time the clings would arrive, she thought of her hometown. Shawn bought enough for many of the Main Street merchants and services.

Pictured on the clings are $100-bills. She ordered the printing to include "Spend your rebate check here".

This is even more remarkable because Shawn's accounting practice is in another city!

Do you know of someone who is doing something for their home town? Is it you? Let's talk about it on the blog.

Economics as an Auction

by Jeff Limpert from Ohio

When you spend money, consider that you are participating in a grand and invisible auction. Every decision to purchase a thing or service is done in unspoken competition with other people buying the same things and services. I do not mean to say we are all going after the same loaf of bread, video game, or gallon of gasoline, but rather the cumulative effect of our buying decisions have a direct impact on the final selling price.

When manufactures and retailers see that a product is selling well, they can be confident the inventory in their possession will "turn" at a quick enough pace to allow a set return on their investment (for a retailer a turn occurs when something on the store shelf sells). The quicker it sells and is replaced by another to sell the higher the number of turns the store is making on its investment.

A small retailer selling fishing rods may only have a few turns a year on seasonal equipment.

A baker on the other hand would not be in business very long if the shop's inventory of bread took three months to sell off before more bread could be baked.

Enter the 2008 Tax Rebate Stimulus package

Imagine we are all in one store deciding what goods and services we want to buy today. Imagine now, while we are weighing the merits of each purchase someone else begins walking throughout the store handing out small packets of money to each shopper. We buyers are suddenly emboldened. We are rich, if only for a moment. Impulses cause us to buy an extra toy we had been hesitant about since we have other more important things to buy. Other shoppers are doing the same thing and cash registers start to ring. When we run out of our extra money the nice stranger placed in our hands, we find that we didn't really get all that much out of it, compared to what we could have if we had slowed down and asked ourselves, "are there were better ways to spend this gift?". Our children have a couple of toys they otherwise wouldn't have, and we may have had a nice vacation, or paid off a credit card, but that's about it. The money that each of us has spent quickly winds up as large pools of wealth in bank accounts of the people and companies who will make more of the same stuff that got us into this mess.

Look at this from another angle:

Move the setting into what you imagine a real auction to be: we are all in one room bidding on items we wish to purchase and we each have a bucket of money. Someone starts moving around the room dropping more money into each of our buckets. All of a sudden the amount of bidding increases. Items are going for higher rates because we all have more money to buy the things we want. In the end, we don't get any more "stuff"; we just paid more for it.

Both examples illustrate an underperformance in results. How could the extra money be applied?

Let's Participate in a Different Type of Auction

When the nice person hands you your rebate check, walk out of the store that has all that extra money in it and go to another store that has less traffic, less demand, and could actually help you prolong the availability of the money to you and your neighbors.

We are asking people to buy from other people in their community (who will perform a benefit to you the purchaser) and at the same time let the person we bought from have a chance to buy from another person in our community. This is keeping the money near us where it can do the most good.

We are sure you have heard about how large cities need sports arenas and tourist dollars to spur the local economy. The argument goes on to say that each dollar brought in from outside the city can circulate three or more times before moving back to the larger economy. We can use the same logic here to justify our belief that if you consciously spend your money by giving it to people in your local community, and they also spend it locally, there will be a cumulative improvement in the amount of wealth and prosperity for each locality which adopts this practice.

For Example

Given a town of 10,000 (let’s assume there are 4,000 households with 3,200 marriages and 800 single people).

At the time of this writing the married couples might each receive $1,200 and the single people $600 each. Parents will receive $300 for each child under 17.

That gives us:

What could your family and friends do with 20-odd million dollars?

|| IRS Economic Stimulus Payment Calculator ||

In Conclusion

In the big store we get more of the same.

By using the rebate money in our local community, we can get our roofs fixed, help with yard work, plumbing, and all the other things that small businesses do for us every day.

Make no doubt about it; we will still have to buy our usual goods and services from major retailers as normal, but let's decide to use this gift to make a better world beginning in our own neighborhood.

 Now the choice is ours. We can either stay in the big store and send all of our rebate money to the people who make the things we already buy, or we can use this new money to enrich ourselves and those around us by branching out in our local communities to buy other goods and services.

It's a gift, America, use it well. Will you join us? - Jeff

[Article Portal at www.USAStimulus.com]

A New (Old) Cycle for Money

by Jeff Limpert from Ohio

History

History tells us that small economies are plagued by a shortage of money and causes no end to difficulty when someone wants to buy something. They have either goods or services to offer, but not the cash to pay for it. The person who has something to sell may not need what the buyer has to offer in exchange, so a third party comes into the picture to help. That could be someone with enough money to buy the product the original buyer wants to give to the seller thus giving the buyer the cash needed to complete the purchase. The third party now has to find a way to sell what he bought from the original buyer.

The introduction of money fixed all of this. It allowed the establishment of a standard unit of exchange which everyone could accept and eventually led to a relative stabilization of prices compared to before. The problem still remained of how to get money in the first place.

I have had a couple of history teachers who loved to use the examples from the early years of our country, and the colonial period before that. People had to come up with all sorts of inventive ways to exchange one thing for another and were starving for cash or "specie" as coin was referred to. Fortunately we do not have to worry about that, for the moment.

Current Status

Fast forward to today; we still may not have enough money do to all the things we want, but it is a whole lot easier. We have solved the problem of not having enough money by institutionalizing the process of promising to pay based on future expected income through loans. And we have made money more readily available — by being able to effectively create it out of thin air.

Additionally, we have the appearance of wealth because we have been able to convince people here and in other countries around the world that the money is valuable. Like all good ideas it works until someone figures out how to game the system. As a result, we have wound up with money everywhere. People are scrambling to get as much as they can without asking the question, "Will the way we're doing it have a good long-term impact or not?". Add to that a government that, for some reason, decided to give a whole bunch of money (that also didn't exist) to just about anyone with a good cause, or "special interest."

Now the pigeons are coming home to roost.

Uncle Sam is fixing this with the Tax Rebate Stimulus package to put money in our pockets in the hope it will keep the wheels of our economy going. For that to work, we need to break our old habits of throwing whatever we have available to fix an immediate problem (rather than be proactive, or consider the consequences).

Try Something New

We suggest that we stop doing the same things that got us into this mess. In order to have a vibrant economy we need to have at a minimum:

1) People able to obtain goods and services they need to sustain and improve their lives

 2) Know that whatever changes we have to go through, that we will have everything we need to adapt and continue to provide for our families

3) Each be confident in our ability to offer our children a better world

This list is just a reflection of the moment, made as broadly and simply as can be done while doing dozens of other tasks (necessary to launch this web site). You can make your own list of what society needs now, and in the long run. We would love to see your comments to this article.

Our Solution

We need to return to a simpler model to keep going. A lot of people talk about "sustainability" as if there is some grand solution that can be administered by a few wise people who know everything. It won't happen. Here is our suggestion for the best use of the tax rebate in the absence of any better plan coming out of Washington:

Take the money from the rebate and use as much of it as you can to stimulate the small businesses and individual self-employed people in your cities, towns, and neighborhoods with they understanding that they will also attempt to keep as much of what you give them local by also spending it close to home.

To do this, you can make inquiries, legal contracts, form associations & co-ops, talk to civic leaders to get them involved and so many more actions that we will never think of simply because we are not you and we do not know what your community (or you as an individual) need the most.

To make it more noticeable, we are also asking that when you pay cash that you take the time to mark each bill with a small inverted triangle in the top margin over the portrait of the president. It will serve as a reminder to you and others who see it that the money is local and still working for the community.

Then tell the people (that you are doing business with) what the mark means.

And finally, ask the business owners to visit our site and print out the materials we offer. It will help inform shoppers that the business will do it's best to extend the circulation (life of the money) in the local economy.


[Article Portal at www.USAStimulus.com]

We offer this site as a convenient clearinghouse for questions, ideas and information about revitalizing our neighborhoods, communities, small towns and cities. The tax rebate stimulus is just the beginning of many opportunities.

The purpose of U.S.A. Stimulus is to help those engaged in making their communities better places to live, enjoy recreation and do business. As you share your community's initiatives, you will also gain insight into what other groups are doing to implement solutions in their areas.

We hope that by working together we can help each other avoid developing flawed plans that would otherwise contain strategic errors. For example, when talking with an interim Main Street Director for ideas, he said, "I may not know much about what your city can do, but I can offer from experience what not to do!" This is valuable information.

Ask questions - others using this site will have probably faced and solved them already.

Tell us what you're doing - see if someone benefits from your experience.

 Jeff & ConiAnn