Back to the biofuel conspiracies again, eh? I don't really think the stimulus was moving forward on those en masse as far as I could tell. Correct me if I am wrong.

Well frankly, I'd rather be "frightened" into doing something that helps us domestically rather than being "frightened" into something that forces us to spend over a trillion abroad. If Republicans are so worried about the deficit, why are they so gung ho on the ludicrous amount of money national defense costs us? You want to talk about pork barrel spending.

First off, subsidies to corn based ethanol causing starvation isn’t a "conspiracy" it’s a fact. It is considered one of (if not ‘the’) leading factors to the massive famine in 2008. It’s a great demonstration on how the unintended consequences of a decision on the scale that the President and Congress make can lead to massive suffering and death throughout the world.

Secondly, don't rewrite history! 58% of Democrat Senators voted for the War on Iraq and there were lots of conservative minded people (like myself) who opposed the war. The difference between my position then and now, is that the United States choose to go to war and has an obligation to return Iraq to a state of stability and security because of that decision.

Now the difference between National Defence Spending and this stimulus bill is that defence spending actually creates a residual value. When you re-sod the lawn at the national mall (or dig ditches and refill them as Keynes suggested) no research and development is done, no private infastructure is built, and when the job is completed more government money has to be spent in order to keep people employed; this is the reason FDR spent so much money and unemployment remained high throughout his term. In contrast, a large portion of defense spending is done in the private sector which produces factories and research institutions; and they typically end up developing practical solutions to problems which are similar to those private individuals have. World War II (as awful as it was) ended up producing most of the technology that was used to build most consumer products for the next 30 years, and lead to one of the most prosperous times for the united states.

So you like spending, but only spending that you like?

I tend to think that it's reasonable to believe that spending on smart things that yield a return is better than spending money that gives no return. It's the lesser of 2 governmental evils.

I think Obama could easily start another war. Look at the history of America after WW2. War after war, setting up and bringing down dictators, by both Democrat and Republican presidents. I wonder if Obama will be forced into doing something about eroding American power... anything to stay on top of the pack right? At least from there you can make the rules.

I had to kind of rush my reply as I was off for school, but the point I wanted to make is that many of the things in the stimulus have a lot of "residual" value.  Ironically, the particular provision happysqurriel quoted was one of the first things taken out of a bill.  I mean it doesn't make sense to me to criticize a bill for something that didn't make it into the final bill.  Things are hammered out during the legislative process.  A lot of things are considered, rejected, and added.  Its normal.  If anything, what he quoted says that there were changes to the stimulus.

Education spending, at least from my perspective, is fundamentally residual in terms of the value it gives.  Not to mention that the education sector was on the chopping block and was facing over half a million potential job losses.  And I know you like to comment on how inefficient the public school system is on how much they spend per student compared to the private school.  There is a reason for that.  Public schools have to spend a lot of money on mentally handicapped and challenged kids.  They often have to hire a large amount of staff just to handle those kids (sign language staff, individual staff to give mentally challenged kids attention, special classrooms and equipment for them, not to mention every other miscellaneous cost the school has to incur as a result).  The percentage of those kids that the private school system handles in comparison is incredibly small.  This drives their costs way down.  I would be genuinely surprised if private schools didn't spend less per child than public schools do.

I don't question that defense spending has some residual value too, but there is exorbitant amounts of waste in defense spending.  Congress has gone through and bought multi-billion dollars worth of equipment that the military says it will not use because Congress is worried about "hurting the private sector" who manufactures these goods.  If that isn't wasteful spending, I don't know what is.  Not to mention that military technology is ludicrously expensive.  Just five of some of the bombs we drop in the Middle East cost as much as the entire amount allocated to the National Endowment of Arts in the stimuls, $50 million.  I'm sorry, but I think investing that $50 million in our own culture has more resdidual value than five bombs do.  I am completely for investing in new technlogy, but military spending is out of control in proportion to the value it has.

Not to mention he is completely misrepresenting the Keynsian viewpoint and eliding many facts that clearly weaken his conclusions (like that FDR did try to cut spending and it came back to haunt him when the economy dipped into another recession, and he is assuming that it is as easy to get out of a depression once you are in the thick of it rather than prospectively avoid it with spending).

Akuma, so your assuming that the $2000-$3000 cost difference between average private school costs, and public school costs are due entirely to handicapped students? I'd love for you to provide some hard numbers to back your claim up.

@Akuma,

First off "The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up." is a direct quote of John Keynes so how am I misrepresenting his views? Realistically, keynesian economics is not that much different from welfare except that everyone knows that it forces people to do unproductive work, and everyone knows that the money they're currently receiving is temporary. This causes two problems, since the people are working they are prevented from taking lower paying jobs elsewhere, and since they know the work is temporary they are amazingly careful with their money so (no matter how much you pay them) spending doesn't return to normal.

Now, investment in education is valueable when it is done well but it can't be called a economic stimulus to provide a boost to a sinking economy. On top of this, the problems in the US public education system are far deeper than simply funding being that the US ranks very high in per capita spending on education (#2 in 2001 : http://www.oclc.org/reports/escan/economic/educationlibraryspending.htm) and gets outperformed by several countries which spend a fraction as much.

Do you honestly think the government has no meaningful work to pay people to do? I have seen almost no provisions in the stimulus that I would call unproductive work. You are talking about things in abstraction and aren't even attacking actual things that are in the stimulus bill. All you are doing is ignoring facts and going over talking points.

So didn't you just admit that infrastructure type programs and things are temporary in nature? And isn't every infrastructure or comparable program job temporary in nature? Its called contracting, and most of the contracting the government will be doing is with private firms. You are completely ignoring this.

Education jobs are not temporary in nature. So if anything, they are better than some of the very things you are proposing.

Why can't education be called a stimulus to the economy? Because you aren't building roads and bridges? That is absurd. How is paying people to work in one sector any different than paying people to work in another sector when that money is going into people's hands directly on an immediate basis and can turn around and spend that money in the economy. We have actually risen recently in terms of how we rank abroad compared to other countries in terms of the quality of our education (ironically in part to programs like NCLB, which could still use more funding).

Now I am not against reevaluating how we approach public education. I think it should be treated much more like the public sector and teacher's unions should lose a severe amount of the power they have. I'm not against reforming the education system. Honestly I think a large factor in how high are costs are is how spread out this country is. Having to maintain all these rural school districts can be pretty expensive.

That also goes back to mrstickball's point. Private schools are only going to operate in places that are profitable, like larger cities that have the population base to support them. Public school's have to operate everywhere by law. This significantly raises costs and private schools would never invest in a small rural area where they couldn't make a profit.

Its like comparing the United States Postal Service to Fed Ex. Fed Ex chooses where it wants to deliver and does not deliver to certain places if it can't make a profit there. The federal government is by law required to deliver everywhere. You are attributing all these extra costs to inefficiency. While arguably it is inefficient to have to provide service to everyone, that's the cost society has to pay for its education system because otherwise a significant amount of people would not receive an education. Unless you suggest that we just screw over rural America.

Akuma,

A stimulus package is a one time spending project where long term jobs are created without the need for further government spending. An example of a stimulus package would be the government investing $250 Billion on internet infastructure to ensure that the United States had the highest quality and highest speed internet in the world that was available at an affordable price. While investment in infastructure on the internet has the effect of creating temporary jobs building the infastructure, the real value of the investment is the residual value that comes from it ... There would be a massive ammount of knowledge and understanding gained by Americans and American companies when building the infastructure, and having the world's largest ultra high-speed network would result in many of the products and services of the future being developed by American companies which ended up employing Americans.

Jobs in education and government run healthcare may be long term jobs, but next year (and for every year following) they will require greater spending from the government and the investment will never result in jobs being created in the private sector.