| akuma587 said: You think investing $250 Billion in internet infrastructure is a wise idea? Your conservative brethren were gnashing their teeth at the very idea of spending anything on that recently. And frankly I think that is way too much for that one project. The stimulus package is doing a lot of different things like what you are talking about. Why is that worse than investing in just one thing? The odds sound better to me that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and stimulate several different sectors of the market rather than just construction. I honestly don't see why people think if it isn't something like construction it isn't stimulus. Hasn't our economy moved away from manufacturing and things of that nature progressively more every year? Why should we only stimulate that sector of the economy when our economy has so much broader of a base? It just doesn't make sense to me. |
The internet infastructure spending wasn't a "Plan" as much as it was an example of the difference between stimulus and a spending bill ...
Now the reason why construction is what people envision as stimulus is because a stimulus package is supposed-to-be a one time government spending bill that has long term residual value. The whole point of education is that improving the education of a child from kindergarten through university or trade school provides value throughout the rest of their life; and the whole point of medicare is that improving/maintaining a person's health through their entire life provides value for society on the whole. No matter how much you value education or healthcare, you can't realistically think that investment in these fields really acts like a stimulus bill is supposed to.
When it comes to R&D spending the problem is that the US government is spending money in areas where private industry is already spending enough money on that diminishing returns mean that further investment is (mostly) wasted. An example of this is battery research and development ... Between a few hundred million Cell Phones sold per year, the Nintendo DS, Apple iPod, Sony PSP, and countless other devices that use batteries there is aready a massive investment in battery technology and the improvement is happening about as quickly as is possible. Whether or not people are willing to accept it or not, renewable energy sources like Wind and Solar are also developing nearly as quickly as is possible being that countless massive corporations are spending tons of money developing these technologies because they see the potential return on this investment.
Where the potential for R&D spending to produce the long-term residual value comes in is when the government undertakes a massive project with unprecidented challenge which ends up forcing people to develop solutions to problems they didn't know existed before, like the space race did.
