As thousands of Americans turn to the internet to find out where their stimulus check has got to, the mainstream press has started to crank out hundreds of “How to spend your stimulus check” filler articles. Like this piece form The Washington Post urging hard-pressed Americans to donate their rebate checks to charitable organizations supporting “our troops and their families.”

This is because most mainstream journalists are too lazy to report on what’s really going. Peter Schiff, writing in The Daily Reckoning, says the Bush ’stimulus’ package is really a handout to lenders. He also asks this: If there are no tax increases on the table to fund the rebates, who ends up footing the bill?

“The Bush legislation includes a provision that offers generous tax credits to individuals who buy homes out of foreclosure,” says Peter D. Schiff in Money Morning.

“While this is billed as a benefit to homebuyers, it is just another handout to lenders, since the prospective buyers qualifying for the tax breaks will simply pay more at auctions as the tax breaks subsidize higher bids. The real winners are the creditors who will now get more in foreclosure than they would have had buyers not been counting on having their bids subsidized by the government.

“Of course, for all the talk about taxpayer bailouts, none of the Senators bothered to mention that — for the moment — no tax increases actually are on the table. Instead, the bailouts are being financed by savers, pensioners, wage earners, investors and the elderly on fixed incomes, who all suffer staggering increases in their costs of living, as the Fed uses inflation to rob Main Street to pay off Wall Street.”