What if I had not spent the 300?  What if NO ONE had?  This is very hypothetical, since the first thing any thinking person would do with 300 free dollars from the President to fight the evildoers is buy 300 bags of pretzels from Wal-Mart and send them to George as a token of your appreciation.  But let's pretend Wal-Mart doesn't exist.

Now, the US (nominal) GDP was about 13 trillion in 2006. Scale back by, say, 5% per year to 2003 and you get about 11 trillion. So the tax rebate, assuming it was immediately spent, amounted to 0.35% of GDP. But there is a "multiplier" effect in that when that money is spent it increases the revenue of businesses by the same amount, and they can spend it in their turn, and so on. I suppose there are two ways to estimate the multiplier. One is to use the ratio of GDP to consumer spending, and the other is to compare the ratio of GDP to the M1 money supply (as that's where the Bush rebate was applied).

So the effect of the Bush rebate was not negligible.

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on TV, but I do have a syndicated column on a blog ;-)

Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK? — The War Nerd