digg

Testing comment, you can dig me down if you want.

may be

i'm donating the entire 5 cents
(seriously, i'm a student and my taxable income is very little to begin with)

This is so stupid, he could have spent that money on fuel, it's not that expensive. I mean how much fuel will he get from one cheque? Yea, I spelt it cheque, because I can spell. I'm European, you wouldn't understand *smells own fart*

Do illegal immigrants get those checks?I gotta pay my bills too,you know.

Am I the only one who doesn't find the onion funny?

I wish I was getting money for free :(

The onion can be funny, but it is NOT news. Who diggs this? I wish people would stop putting Onion stories up on digg news. If you want satire and fake news go to those sites directly.

Don't feel sorry for people with big cars and a big houses.

This guy made his decisions when he didn't purchase fuel efficient car and didn't consider energy costs along side what is likely too high of a mortgage.

Feeling sorry for people like that is like feeling sorry for the banking system.

The reality is, these are investments, and this guy sucks at investing. That's his problem. Anyone with half a brain knew in 2000 the housing market was dying and that the nation was going into a recession. That's why having the central bank aggressively cut rates is a horrible idea because it spurs people like this to... get in while they can. OK, but we weren't facing a common recession, we knew the energy criss was coming. Anyone who didn't was just clearly stupid or in denial.

Yet millions of American's went out and leveraged their personal equity to buy monster sized houses with little understanding how rising energy costs might effect them. Instead they bought big under the premise that a house is the best investment they can make. However, the reality is, until energy prices come down, big houses have to decline in value the most because of energy costs and the impracticality of heating and cooling a monster house. BIG HOUSES should lose value the fastest and anyone dumb enough to have low efficiency electric or oil heat should have though twice about either their house size or at least it's heating and cooling efficiency.

We can't really ask any less of individuals as investors than to think of common sense things like this. People who simply didn't believe an energy crunch was coming really helped cause the problem by being so selfishly wasteful in the first place. On top of it all... this guy probably didn't consider getting a smaller house with say... wood heat. NO no that would have cost too much up front, so instead he drowns in energy costs. What does he drive ? A truck or an SUV ? When he bought his new home did he move further from his job or closer ?

I live in a rural area and gas prices just aren't so high that it has a major effect on me. I don't anyone but long distance commuters or people who like to drive a lot during high gas prices are realistically getting hurt that bad.

Just do the math. The average person only needs to drive around 12-15 thousands miles per year. Even at 20 mpg the difference between 2 dollar gas and 3.50 gas per year is small... about 800 bucks extra a year.. AND that's with a very low fuel efficiency.

So, you know, most of these people have been making high wages by commuting or running a business and they simply aren't being practical with their grasp on the reality of energy prices. HELLO.

Many of the smarter people plan ahead, have bought fuel efficient vehicles and will reduce the size of their service area to adjust to high transport costs. That and getting off oil and low efficiency heat like most older/cheaper electric heat pumps.

If you don't know the basics of home heating costs.. YOU SHOULDN'T BUY A HOME UNTIL YOU LEARN.

I saw ALL this coming, so when I looked at houses I looked for NATURAL GAS heat, wood heat or even pellet stoves as options. AND I only looked at houses WELL under my price range limit, not at the top of it. I was able to find houses here in Maryland for 30-40k that needed minor work to move in but had good fixer upper potential... AND I'm not really a fixer upper guy, but when the times are obviously getting tougher you don't just respond with denial. Deny global warming, deny raising energy prices, deny the housing bubble is bursting since 2000 right before your eyes.

Sorry, but I've been preaching these facts since BEFORE Bush was even in office. Officially the recession began around 1999, low interest rates made it vanish, but real it just let the recession fester and allowed more people to over extend their credit.

Now of course, not only will energy continue to rise, but interest rates MUST go back up. We HAVE TO STOP adjusting interest rates as some childish attempt to stimulate the economy. You just bound to cause inflation and constantly need to readjust your cost of operations, unstable fuel prices make that bad enough without the feds trying to constantly tweak interest rates.

So, has this guy really though any of this out, or does he just mindless hand over his money to corporate America ?

This is the same story as the lady on the news talking about I went from 70k a year to food stamps. OK, but where you perhaps a real estate agent living in denial that the housing recession has been around for 8 years and obviously artificially stimulated by EMERGENCY interest rate cuts ?

Ok, I feel sorry for you... until I realize your mortgage is 2500 a month and you say you can't afford fuel and energy.

Sorry, but ***** YOU. Idiots like this are the reason the housing market fell through. Sure the banks shouldn't lend out the money, but CMON the would be buyers also shouldn't take on debts that they can just barely afford.

Everyone should know that 1999 market the US ending a long streak of economic expansion. Everyone knows that good times don't last forever. The housing bubble was a well know fact and you could literally see it happen in California first and move across the popular real estate locations of the US.

Anyone who didn't prepare is PART OF THE PROBLEM. Maybe if you'd stop writing off the reality of limited resources and the downfall of national debt and perhaps elect leader that weren't global embarrassments then you'd deserve pity.

But, HOW ELSE would these people ever learn from their wasteful ways if not having to eventually pay for them ? Tell me that.

When President Carter said he didn't want to import a "drop of foreign oil" and recommend American's turn down their thermostats WAY BACK in the 70s.... how did the average American react.. They got angry and laughed him out of office on the...don't tell me how to live platform... and then YOU ***** elected the actor President Ronald Reagan who went about giving the wealthy the largest tax breaks in history.

And... so long as the simplicities of your life stays relatively the same chances a you're not politically active. SO, sorry about your luck. Next time listen to scientists and noble prize winners who form petitions and such to warn you to not vote for Bush, to warn your of the energy crisis and global warming and the housing bubble.

Who the ***** does the average American think they are? So arrogant they can't bother to listen to experts, but they love the combination of bikini girls and propaganda on Fox News. AND now the taxpayers are going to bail you out.

Endless amounts of university professors told you this was coming and you wrote it off as a conspiracy theory.

The reality is, after a decade of economic boom and relative good times in recent decades American's have lost their bearings and their common sense. They are so detached from reality they couldn't even HANDLE imagining anything but an endless economic boom.

AND, while people like Al Gore were the primary federal motivation behind commercializing the internet and thus causing the 90s economic boom you ONCE AGAIN laughed him off stage. You voted for Bush over the guy who lead the government to invest in the internet in 91 and OH wow amazingly a few years later the internet is everywhere. Even WAY back in 86 Gore was pushing for a data highway as he called it then. Reagan of course would have none of that and likely most of the congressional democrats and republicans were hardly any better.

The average American citizen is just completely clueless. People took the Y2K bug more seriously than the looming energy crisis. How do you not see fossil fuel takes millions of years to make and is in limited supply ?

How do you build a huge house without considering oil prices may spike and electric will likely go up also.... which it is about to as power plants compete with coal export prices on the fallen dollar.

That is, with the US currency at 50% ish American coal is now basically half priced. The global community will.. BUY it while it's cheap. Just like they've done with food stores recently. On speculation from bad crop production they BUY low and SELL high and all that has to happen is a few thousand people starve to death and everyone else pays more. NICE way to make a living. Kind of like... flipping houses and over appraising them until home values are so high people can't afford to live in them. Then you just have empty unpaid houses sitting around.

Similar but much worse conditions happened in the great depression however the government had mass programs to keep owners in their houses even if they couldn't pay the whole mortgage. That makes a HELL of a lot more sense than kicking people our of their houses so it sits there empty or so some guy with lots of cash can buy it LOW and sell it HIGH.

Hey investors... ***** YOU TOO. When the working class gets control of this government WE ARE GOING TO TAX THE ***** OUT OF THE WEALTHY.

WE ARE GOING TO TAX TAX TAX until the working class gets better
AND if you try to push that tax back onto the consumer we'll TAX YOU OUT OF BUSINESSES.

Why... causes we can bitches... that's democracy. The working class has ALL the power when they want to wield it and every couple decades it OUR DUTY to even the playing field against the wealthy... who have been getting richer and richer faster and faster... literally at your expensive.

At the expensive of your comfort and health Exxon gets rich and Fox news buys more media companies and defense contractors steal billions of dollars through over priced no bid contracts from their GOP buddies.

And what.. you think that's more conspiracy theory... OK. well I prepared for the energy crunch so I'm not the one being taught an economic lesson. Rather I can sit back comfortably getting much of my fuel for free with a tiny mortgage and low credit card debt.

Because.. I'm not a stubborn asshole who's too arrogant to realize when the economy is going downhill or realize you CAN'T ELECT SPOILED RICH KIDS as presidents. That's the complete opposite of a responsible leader. Bush is a man who's never had a real obstacle in life, who's never succeeded at anything impressive and who's ALWAYS had a rich and influential family to bail him out.

If you morons had just elected Al Gore chances are the dollar would be going UP and gas prices would be roughly 50% cheaper.. since MOST of the cost increase is not from OPEC, but rather from the falling dollar value.

I wish Digg would tag any Onion links with (ONION) in the headline

Wow that guy is an idiot, you could buy a ton of dura-flame logs for how much that check was worth.

this isn't even funny, this is moronic. This is becoming more like 4chan.

What dumb stuff, and idiots on digg increased the rank of this?!?!

Let's think this through a little... The paper checks don't get mailed out for another month. The amounts people get are more than "$618" unless he's making over $150K married so if this guy can't afford heat, he's a moron wasting money on crap.