Walz’s $2000 check won’t get you much

According to Gov. Tim Walz and Lieutenant Gov. Penny Flannagan,

Surely, $2,000 is a step up from $350, but there are a couple of things wrong with Walz’s claim.

Assuming that a household does indeed spend $2,000 on a couple of months’ rent, it means no money left over for anything else. And families have a lot of needs. They cannot choose to either just pay rent or buy diapers. When that money is stretched over a lot of things, it does not buy much of anything.

And if your family lives in the Metro region, where average rents are as high as $1,500, a $2,000 check would only cover one month’s rent, with little else. What happens in the following months? Suffice to say, Walz is not offering meaningful relief.

In fact, $2,000 would not even cover the cost of inflation. As the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee estimated, the average Minnesota household paid about $750 in April to cover inflation. A $2,000 check would cover less than three months of inflation costs.

This is not to say that Walz should offer bigger checks. One-time rebate checks are unattractive for a lot of other reasons that have nothing to do with the amount, as American Experiment has illustrated.

Only permanent tax cuts will provide the kind of relief that Minnesotans need without bringing other harmful consequences.