1 Bush 2008 Stimulus as a Function of Income and Family Status

Taking advantage of snw_stimulus_checks_bush from the PrjOptiSNW Package, this function presents stimulus checks at different income levels for households with different children count and martial status. The function considers the bush stimulus checks from the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. IRS information provides information at the Economic Stimulus Payment Information Center.

Note that the Bush stimulus is a tax rebate, so we compute tax liability based on snw_tax_liability.

The Stimulus policy is expressed in the following formula, first four components (\(M\) is marital status, equals to 1 for married, 0 for unmarried, \(K\) is the number of kids, \(Y\) is pre-tax income) :

  • \(\displaystyle \textrm{MinChk}(M)=300\cdot \left(1+M\right)\)

  • \(\displaystyle \textrm{CappedRebate}(Y,K,M)=\min \Big(\textrm{TaxLiability}\left(Y,K,M\right),600\cdot \left(1+M\right)\Big)\)

  • \(\displaystyle \textrm{PhaseOut}(Y,M)=\max \Big(0,Y-75000\cdot (1+M)\Big)\cdot 0.05\)

  • \(\displaystyle \textrm{KidsChk}(K)=300\cdot K\)

Overall Tax-rebate Stimulus is:

\[\textrm{Bush08StimulusTaxRebate}=\max \left(\max \bigg(\textrm{MinChk}(M),\textrm{CappedRebate}(Y,K,M)\bigg)+\textrm{KidsChk}(K)-\textrm{PhaseOut}(Y,M),0\right)\]

1.1 Bush Stimulus Checks for Unmarried Households

Check base amount per adult and per child for the first and second rounds.

Visualize stimulus check amounts.

bl_visualize = true;
[fl_stimulus_adult, fl_stimulus_child] = deal(600, 300);
bl_marital = 0;
for it_kids=0:1:4
    snw_stimulus_checks_bush(it_kids, bl_marital, fl_stimulus_adult, fl_stimulus_child, bl_visualize);
end

1.2 Bush Stimulus Checks for Married Households

Visualize stimulus check amounts.

[fl_stimulus_adult, fl_stimulus_child] = deal(600, 300);
bl_marital = 1;
for it_kids=0:1:4
    snw_stimulus_checks_bush(it_kids, bl_marital, fl_stimulus_adult, fl_stimulus_child, bl_visualize);
end