We are all Slave now.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Absolutely.

But if you are comparing different ways to spend a certain amount of government money, then you may be comparing more lower-paid jobs with fewer higher-paid jobs, and added differentials between costs of materials and the wages/profits that go to execs and owners, so it's not so simple.

Maybe the difference is not so small. If anyone can find actual research that addresses this, I'd be curious to see it. When I tried, I found some crap from Heritage and Cato that I didn't bother to share here.

You want people earning enough to have discretionary income to throw around. An army of people paid subsistence wages does nothing for the economy.

This is why the media's fixation on unemployment numbers drives me nuts. The only stat that matters at the moment is wage stagnation.