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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (5864)	7/16/2001 3:24:04 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

<Everyone knows that wars are good for the economy - the government pumps money into the economy, usually through deficit spending. I don't know if Keynes ever actually came out and said it this way, but deficit spending counteracts recessions, without spending the money on war. Why spend the money on war if you don't have to? > Are you mad? Have you checked out a war zone? Wars are not good for "the economy". Hordes of people end up dead and huge amounts of stuff are destroyed and hordes of people stop producing useful stuff and produce not only useless stuff but destructive stuff. It is vastly easier to destroy things than to build them. Please try to justify that insane and absurd cliche that war is good for the economy. Maybe you mean war as in 'the war on drugs'? Or do you really mean it's a good idea to nuke a few cities? China was at war with itself for a few decades. I heard of a guy who grew up in the midst of it. I wonder if he thought the fighting, killing and mayhem were economically productive. Now he is fearful that the world will have a financial collapse. Some dumb Congressman [or dumb President] might figure "Duh! Oh, I get it! If we defend Taiwan by firing a bunch of stuff at China, then the economy will pick up. Well, it sure sounds a lot of fun and I am pretty tough and Jiang has really annoyed me - he's just not recognizing human rights. Okay you guys, let 'er rip!! I'll watch on CNN. Then we'll all get rich and people will love me and vote for me". Maybe you mean that if the big, tough, USA attacks some weak country and steals their property or forces them to give stuff to the USA cheaply, that's good for the USA economy. Well, even that is debatable, but the USA was founded on slavery. Benjamin Franklin, that great exponent of freedom, kept slaves, so I can see how the thinking would arise. Invading Saudi Arabia and stealing their oil probably would be good for the USA economy as defined by the economic position of the jerk in the SUV. And also, if an economy is growing exponentially and the money supply arithmetically, that will cause inflation, not deflation [except for in the very early stages when there would be a slight deflation and depending on just which exponents and arithmetic growth rates you mean]. Exponential goes up faster than arithmetic in most usage of the words. Mqurice