"not to mention the 40% government inefficiency overhead."
No sensible person believes that... even your own ideologues don't believe that.
No sensible person should think they can be so exact with estimates of government efficiency vs. the private sector, or with deadweight costs of funding things through our tax system, but the 1st is a real issue, if difficult to quantify, and 2nd has been estimated by studies to be around 70% on the marginal additional federal spending dollar. *
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* That doesn't mean its 70% or even necessarily anything close to that on the average currently spent dollar, it would tend to increase as government spending increases. Also it doesn't necessarily mean that increasing government spending is a net negative, only that you would have to get a benefit worth more than $1.70 to make an additional dollar of government spending worthwhile. Also that study was done before the current recession, and was not considering the idea of stimulus, to the extent you get an actual useful stimulus from government spending it would reduce the deadweight cost, for example some stimulus supporters argue for a multiplied of 1.5 ** , if that's the case then the dollar of additional spending would only need approximately $1.13 in net benefit to be justified, or even less if the same conditions that argued for stimulus, also some how temporarily reduced the dead weight loss factor.
** Itself a generally questionable, certainly overly precise number, and a factor that wouldn't be constant but would decline the bigger the stimulus is (if printing and spending money was the way to wealth Zimbabwe would be the richest country on the planet), but a number that I'll accept for the moment for the sake of argument, without really believing in it. |
