Have you heard the news? Mailboxes everywhere will soon be filled with checks from the US Treasury. Yes, you have won the lottery, George Bush/US Congress style.

The concept is simple - we can purchase our way out of an economic slowdown and make the people in Washington look good at the same time. And all they want you to do with the money is spend it! No saving, no investing, no paying off debts - just splurge! This is a free lunch and a lot more. Your federal government is about to spend $250 billion dollars handing out checks to the taxpayers. Who hates the government now? George Bush should be your hero, right?

Not so fast. Look at this plan closely, and you can't help but wonder if anyone put any real thought into it, or whether Congress is preoccupied with deciding whether Roger Clemens should be sworn in before he testifies.

Do you pay your credit cards each month? Some of us pay the interest charges only as we fight to manage our overall debt load. This practice leaves the principal amount due unchanged each month. And, of course, we all use our credit cards each month. So, the amount of interest-only payments never goes down.

It is no different for our federal government. Each year our government spends a lot more than it brings in. So, it gets more credit. A lot more credit.

The money for these so-called stimulus checks - $250 billion dollars - will be borrowed from foreign governments. But the budget for 2008, which runs to Sept. 30, 2008, was $250 billion in the negative before the stimulus package was agreed to. And this figure fails to take into account any other projects Congress decides to pay for before the new budget year starts.

Where do the presidential candidates stand on the issue? Well, John McCain said last week, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." Great. He also said that the time is ripe for spending restraints. Right.

Sen. Obama says his plan for $250 tax rebates will solve everything. Mayor Giuliani awoke in Miami to say his time as mayor of New York has equipped him to handle the economic crises. Oh, and 9-11.

Most of the so-called economists have made it very clear that we are not going to spend our way out of this alleged crisis. Not one has said that the infusion of these funds will bring a quicker solution to what ails this economy.

And the honest ones have said that providing relief to those on unemployment is a better way of pumping money into the economy. But try to get someone from the Heritage Foundation to confirm that. (On the other hand, soon-to-be retired Sen. Pete Dominici actually said he would like the stimulus to reach $300 billion; he also said that sending checks to those who don't pay taxes because they make so little wasn't a bad idea. Too bad Bush didn't agree with him.)

And all that aside, we're still left with the issue of our national debt, which has increased an average of $1.43 billion per day since September 2006. The total is over $9 trillion. Trillion. (The Social Security trust fund has a little over $2 trillion extra at the moment, and Medicare is running a surplus of over $3.6 trillion, so one could argue that our debt is really $5.5 trillion. But most economists use the $9 trillion figure as the correct one.)

And this is where the credit card analogy becomes relevant.

In 2006, the government spent $406 billion of your money on interest payments to the national debt. That's more than triple the combined allocations the same year for important work at the Department of Education ($61 billion), the Department of Transportation ($56 billion) and NASA ($15 billion).

Today we're no closer to reducing the debt, and the interest payment figure is more like $450 billion per year.

Where does that money come from? Every three months our government sells bonds. Believe it or not, Social Security and Medicare systems are the major buyers; these two groups hold over 50 percent of the debt. Our friends overseas hold the rest. Japan holds $644 billion; China holds $350 billion; the wonderful oil-exporting countries own $100 billion in our notes. (And of course you know where Saudi Arabia got the money to buy those bonds.)

It goes both ways. A lot of Americans have made investments in foreign countries. But, as Warren Buffett just noted in his annual letter to shareholders, 2007 marked the first time since 1915 that the net balance of this investment turned negative. "Foreigners now earn more on their US investments than we do on our investments abroad," Buffett wrote. "In effect, we've used up our bank account and turned to our credit card. And, like everyone who gets in hock, the US will now experience "reverse compounding' as we pay ever-increasing amounts of interest on interest.

"I believe that at some point in the future, US workers and voters will find this annual "tribute' (of interest payment on the debt) so onerous that there will be a severe political backlash," Buffett wrote. "How that will play out in markets is impossible to predict - but to expect a "soft landing' seems like wishful thinking."

Enjoy your stimulus check; you will be paying for it the rest of your lives.

Peter Sackett (PeterSackettLaw.com) is an attorney based in Lakewood.