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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (64483)	5/6/2009 2:11:42 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224759

If you are going to pay for them anyway, why not put them to work? But most of the spending isn't "paying for them anyway", since most of it is not for unemployment insurance or welfare or other benefits for newly unemployed people, nor is it the same amount of money applied in other ways, its a much greater amount of money. Also its rather questionable that we are putting many of them to work. Gross job creation is trivial, but pretty unimportant. Net job creation is more difficult, and more difficult to measure. Goodness! If a bridge is falling down and the government fixes it so that the road is usable is that not getting something? If schools are crumbling and the government pays to put people to work building a new school are we not getting something? In gross terms yes. In net term maybe not, maybe we even have a loss. Then consider that most of the money has not gone to such things. And also that a large fraction of the money will likely be spent when the recession is over (and that's even assuming that its really temporary spending, rather than the creation of long term new programs and areas of spending, I tend to agree with Friedman on this that "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program".