I've Been Stimulated!

One of the benefits of having direct deposit is that I get my tax refunds faster than I would if I waited for a check.  And no one is going to steal my direct deposit out of my mailbox.

After hearing from my son last night, I checked my banking app this morning.  Sure enough, my coronavirus stimulus (or, "just add it to the federal debt" money) has been deposited in my account.

According to Snopes, I won't have to pay it back (except, of course, as added interest on the national debt):

While the above metric is fairly straightforward, the CARES Act’s use of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) tax infrastructure to facilitate these payments has caused substantial confusion. That’s because legally the payment is considered a tax credit advanced to the recipient from the (future) 2020 tax return — that is, the return the recipient will file in 2021. This has led some to believe that the payment either needs to be paid back in full in 2020, or that the payment is considered taxable income, or that the payment counts against one’s 2020 tax refund. None of these conclusions, however, is true.

That’s because another provision written into the law dictates that recipients of the economic impact payment will be credited as if they had paid the government back. This makes the payment a non-taxable fund that does not affect future returns. “What’s technically happening is that the person is due a 2020 stimulus rebate ‘credit’ — but that’s reduced by what they received as an advance credit this year, so it exactly cancels out,” Chye-Ching Huang, senior director of economic policy at the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), told us via email. “That just prevents duplicate refunds — there’s no practical impact on their 2020 tax refund.”

Let the eating out begin! (Actually, I've eaten "out" 3 times in the 4+ weeks I've been essentially confined at home, so it would be more accurate to say, Let the eating out continue!)