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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
No. You and I gave us this country. Because we supported a system in which the underclasses could only survive via redistribution, which is an unsound system on every conceivable level.
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If redistribution meant the government takes money from a rich person and gives it to a poor person, maybe so. But that's not what I mean. The government does all sorts of things that create value in the economy and are paid for by taxes: building and maintaining transportation infrastructure, education, health care, national parks, and so on. To the extent that this spending benefits everyone, it pulls up the bottom and has a redistributive effect.
You say that people don't want redistribution, they want work. Well, they want things like jobs building roads and airports and train tracks, and better jobs than an education gets you, and jobs in health care and at businesses near national parks.
Republicans have worked very hard to cripple the government's ability to supply these things.
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The infrastructure plan is a New New Deal. The GOP Congress, however, is too fucking stupid and tied to its austerity religion to understand the economics behind it. And Trump isn't smart enough to explain that a lot of it can be done with private money in public/private partnerships, with a fantastic multiplier effect and limited govt debt. And let's not forget the fools on the Democratic side who hear "public/private" and immediately flip into fits of hysteria about privatization (which these projects are not).
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His infrastructure plan is nothing like a New Deal. It has
some upside, but also
serious limitations.
