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Are more stimulus checks to come? Economists already mixed feelings about President George W. Bush’s economic stimulus package earlier this year, and the chatter about a second stimulus package is just as skeptical.

Last week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told reporters Democrats are considering an additional boost to the economy, which may hit the House of Representatives in September. The first stimulus distributed rebates of up to $1,200 to dual income families earning less than $150,000 a year. However, Politico.com reports Pelosi said she’d like the $50 billion package to include more social support, such as infrastructure spending, heating assistance, state aid and food stamp benefits. Politicians who support a second stimulus hope that infrastructure spending -- building highways, for example – would stimulate the economy by putting Americans to work, according to Fox News [NWS].

The problem is that no one – including President Bush – can agree if the first round of rebates were effective, so it’s no surprise that a second stimulus package is a contentious suggestion.

It would be “as foolish as the first round,” says J.D. Foster, formerly at the Office of Management and Budget under President Bush and now a senior fellow at the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. The first stimulus was “quite ineffective,” Foster says, because he doesn’t think it increased production.

Russ Roberts, an economics professor at George Mason University in Virginia and host of the EconTalk podcast, is worried that rebates would go straight into people’s savings accounts. Rather than stimulating the economy, rebates get stuffed under the proverbial mattress, he says, so “the rationale behind [stimulus packages] doesn’t seem consistent with what people actually do.”

But others disagree. The first stimulus package “may well have stopped the economy from bombing out,” says Michael Ettlinger, vice president for economic policy at the liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress. He’d support a second package, but would prefer as per Pelosi’s plan, that local governments are stimulated. He also thinks a stimulus package should extend unemployment benefits, because “we know that money gets spent!”

Sudden infusions of cash concern Shira Boss, economist and author of Green With Envy, a book that examines our culture’s relationship to money. Unlike Roberts who’s worried rebates would go into savings, Boss is worried rebates won’t be used to pay down debt, the prudent thing to do. “Windfalls are generally spent on non-necessary items,” she says. Boss remembers the stimulus package following 9/11 (“The 2002 Stimulus Act”) and though she carried credit card debt at the time, she spent her rebate on a DVD player.

Debating the merits of a second stimulus could be for naught, however, because at least one economist thinks the idea is just a lot of hot air. The country is four months away from an election, Roberts argues, and economic policy may very well change after Inaugeration Day in January 2009. Since Americans know that, advocates could have trouble drumming up support for a second stimulus.

Congress likely will not be taking up the second stimulus until September, so the country will have to wait and see whether it is still needed or if the economy improves over the next few months.