Anyone know what the multiplier effect is, or did you sleep through economics? If the government spends money on something, it is more likely that those dollars will be re-spent through the economy. The government has spent them once already and the employees are likely to spend those dollars again.
Compare that to just giving people a tax cut. If they decide to save that money or put it towards paying off debt, they have not stimulated the economy much at all. That multiplier is much lower.
Tax cuts aren't like voodoo magic or something. They can't solve every problem. Furthermore, a lot of times the money is spent on products that are manufactured by foreign companies (like manufacturing companies in China that make everything you see at places like Wal-Mart), so the money given with a tax cut is even less likely to stimulate the domestic economy.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
