Yes, it takes a lot of time, effort, and money for the govt. to process these checks. They also spent $42 million just to mail out reminders to people who were supposed to receive the checks (that doesn’t count the cost of actually processing and mailing checks; just mailing out notices).

The checks are actually a result of making permanent changes in the tax laws which lower taxes, but it was made retroactively, hence the “rebates.”

However, it was brought to my attention that these stimulus checks are really quite inefficient. It requires a huge amount of money and work to organize the collection of the money in taxes, then to do the accounting and record keeping, all just to do more bureaucratic work to send it back. It probably amounts to a significant chunk of the money wasted in government bureaucracy. We should just have lower taxes to begin with, rather than have the government take our money and give it back to us.