Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Bottom Line

Esenberg nails it:

The real test of any expenditure of public funds is whether it constitutes a better use of dollars than alternative uses - including private ones.

That encapsulates the entirety of the discussion over Gummint spending.

Non-nuanced followup: the Right says 'military,' the Left says 'social.' Yes, the ideal is in-between, and in the end, the difference(s) are really on a slide-scale between those two.

2 comments:

neomom said...

The comments on Shark allude to what everyone misses in the discussion of government spending/borrowing....

Opportunity Cost

The government is simply not efficient at what it does, so even if one uses the argument that government spending on a rail line (temporarily) creates jobs, it costs more than it would in the private sector.

So how many more jobs would be created if the businesses were to be unburdened a bit?

Beer, Bicycles and the VRWC said...

Even less-nuanced followup: Military spending is Constitutional, Social spending is not.