The so-called stimulus increased the national debt
Mr. Redfish.
Most investments have a debt-side and a payoff. It's hard to have these kinds of discussions without a statistical analysis of the costs/benefits. As a result both sides repeat talking points ad infinitum without contributing actual information.
One question for you is: have any government investments (requiring debt) paid off? The question for the Left is: have any government investments been wasteful? The answer in both cases, I humbly submit, is yes. The danger, IMHO, comes in not seeing this as a complicated matter. For instance, Rush Limbaugh has convinced a generation of Americans that
no government investment has ever paid off. I submit that this is an absurd simplification... which is designed for low information voters who have never studied actual data.
During the Heart of the Great Depression, FDR employed 20,000 otherwise jobless Americans in the construction of the Hoover Dam. This not only saved many great American Families who would have otherwise been destroyed by an economy that didn't have enough jobs for the jobless, but it allowed our nation to fully settle the Southwest and create thriving cities (profit centers). In this case the payoff was, I humbly submit,
arguably worth the debt. You might also look at the debt associated with the Grand Coulee Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, the Fort Beck Dam, LaGuardia Airport and the massive Public Works projects that extended water and energy to the rural south. These kinds of investments have a real upside, and they've put millions of people to work who, in turn, have pumped millions of dollars into local economies so that our struggling small businesses could maintain profit margins and keep people employed.
Government spending on war manufacturing was 110% of GDP during WWII. On Republican logic, this should have crippled us. But this deficit spending - by employing millions of Americans inside the war manufacturing machine and giving them the power to consume on main street - initiated a decades long consumer boom that has never been seen since. This incredible consumer-demand gave capitalists the incentive to invest, innovate and add jobs (because they knew that there were millions of people who could and would buy what they produced). Study the economic and job growth that occurred after we created the war debt, the 50s and 60s, when we were repeaing the benefits of the war
spending[/B] (which left us with a massive manufacturing infrastructure).
Redfish, You get this right? The deficit spending during the war created a manufacturing infrastructure that was effectively converted to peacetime domestic manufacturing - and the jobs produced by this manufacturing machine meant consumers were financially solvent enough to pour money into main street businesses, thus resulting in higher tax revenues to pay down the war debt (which is exactly what happened). We could have built the bombs and dropped them in the ocean, and the result would have been the same: a massive manufacturing infrastructure that employed a massive number of people who, as a direct result, had money to spend on main street, which meant main street could employ even more people, which lead to even more consumer demand, which allowed businesses to hire even more people. This is why the 50s - when the New Deal and Liberal economic reforms were fully in control - was the golden age of capitalism. Consumers had actual money to buy things from our capitalists, unlike the age of Reagan, when we fabricated consumer demand using credit cards and other fancy debt vehicles.
Another thing happened in the 50s: one of our greatest Presidents, Dwight Eisenhower, put a truly massive army of hard working Americans to work building our national interstate system. This had an almost a immeasurable upside for our capitalist class, who could now efficiently expand their markets to new/further destination. The new highway system created many thriving cities who now had the benefit of much cheaper goods (see shipping efficiency). I'm asking you to evaluate the multiplier effect of this kind of spending before you post such simple minded stuff, however well meaning.
Redfish, I agree with you on many points. As a nation we definitely overestimated the power of government to do big things, and, as a result, we have saddled future generations with major problems. Government, having been captured by big oil in 1980, over invested in the infrastructure of petroleum. And now we do not have the means to
efficiently move to a petroleum-scarce energy infrastructure. It gets worse. We also thought that our bumbling incompetent government could [wait for it] rebuild whole Arab nations into shining American democracies. The costs of this trust-in-government will undoubtedly bankrupt future generations of Americans, not least because of the problems which lie in wait from our deepening entanglements in this terrible region.
Listen, you've fully ingested the talking points of your party, yet, characteristic of your talk radio brethren, you have zero data or understanding of which government investments reap benefits and which have been pure waste. You believe that everything government does is wasteful spending, and everything the private sector does is investment. You might study the lobbying system where corporations beg government for billions of dollars a year in subsidies.
Have you ever researched the satellite technology that came out of the Cold War Pentagon & Space Programs - i.e., government spending? Specifically, do you know how much private sector profits have been reaped from massive government spending in technology? Do you know how much government spending poured into Boeing? - and it's multiplier effect in commercial aviation?
After you realize the amount of government money that flows into private sector investments (and the profit it enables), perhaps you'll come back to this forum with something more enlightening and complicated than your tired talking points.
