| HappySqurriel said: The problem with the United States (and to a greater extent Canada) is that it is a very large sparsely populated country; the United States has (roughly) the same area as Europe with 40% the population (and Canada is basically the same area as Europe with 4% the population). One of the few areas where the federal government can operate efficiently, and can produce far greater benefits than the private sector can, is in the production of infrastructure that is necessary to make these large countries operate as one unified economic block. Now, one of the most valuable things the federal government could have done to "Stimulate" the economy would have been to build a new backbone for the internet that connected all of the states together (and the Canadian government could have connected all provinces and territories); and from there the states could have connected all cities and towns together, and the private sector could use this new higher-bandwidth back-bone to sell services to consumers and (indirectly) connected all citizens together. As a rough guestimate, I suspect that the cost of the infrastructure on the federal and state levels would have probably been between $10 Billion and $50 Billion (1.5% to 7.5% of the stimulus bill); but the goods and services that would come from having 300+ Million people connected to each other at ultra high speeds could translate into this money being recovered long term through tax revenue. |
I massively agree with this post. Of course, giving the private sector the money to invest in building up the infrastructure (rather than the Gov't doing it on its own), would be more effective, still.
