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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (481973)	10/27/2003 12:13:30 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 769667

I'll respond to that part later, as I indicated, but debt spending's negatives (the drag on growth later) are ultimately reflected in GDP during those later time periods. Deficit spending in hard economic times was the basic principle advocated by John Maynard Keynes, who over the years has had a lot more followers in Democratic circles than in Republican ones. The two biggest deficit spenders in peacetime (related to the size of the federal budget or the size of the economy) were actually Hoover (in 1932) and Roosevelt (throughout much of the rest of the 1930's). Today's deficits are tame by comparison. If deficit spending is inherently wrong, why is it ok for (a) people to borrow money to build houses; (b) school districts to float bonds (i.e., borrow money) to build schools; and (c) corporations to sell bonds to pay for capital improvements? Some expenditures are designed to provide lasting benefit to the populations, and deficit spending is simply a way to spread the payments for these things over long periods of time (provided that in good times some surpluses are run to balance things out). Environmental impacts are not what GDP is supposed to be measuring; that's like using a yardstick to measure weight.