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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (103146)	2/4/2009 8:11:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544125

Yes, that was the way I read it. OK, so our opinion of her meaning is different. The growth was slowish, but steady. Overall you had essentially no growth through almost the entire decade. It wasn't a simple flat line, there where ups and downs during the decade, but the net effect was close to the same as if there had been a flat line. Not only that, but many of the infrastructure projects that were built then are still being used in one way or another, and still crucial to segments of the country (especially, e.g., the dams in the West, and electrification in many rural areas). The cost to create them was counted as part of the GDP. Measuring the GDP, and then the infrastructure value, double counts the economic activity. It is that infrastructure (and the infrastructure that was built in the 10-20 years after WWII concluded) that many of us take for granted today, and requires some maintenance. Infrastructure spending (depending on how exactly you define it), has been higher in real terms in recent decades than in the 30s. Tilted towards maintenance rather than new building (compared to the 30s, I'm not arguing we put too much in maintenance, and should shift from it to new building), but it isn't reasonable to present the situation as one where we had and still have a bonanza of infrastructure from FDR, that's being undermined by comparatively low spending today.