Quote:
Originally Posted by sgtclub
No, I don't. It's just abundantly obvious to anyone with have a brain that the government does not deploy capital efficiently. Had they taken the $850B and let professionals invest the money, it may have actually be deployed in a manner that would have been worth the cost. You are on the other end of the spectrum. As long as the money is spent, it is "good" and if it doesn't work, it must be because we didn't spend enough. That is assinine.
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Of course, much of the stimulus and just about all of the TARP essentially did invest in private enterprise. It is vastly easier to add teachers, for example, and generate more jobs per million invested than to invest in private enterprise and get the same bang for the buck on job creation.
The only situations where I've seen where I think there was more than one job for every $250K of federal investment were nonprofits hiring at pretty low wages or some (but not all) of the biotech mini-grants given out as part of the therapeutic discovery tax credit/grant program, where the funding went to startups who were desperately understaffed.
Otherwise, yeah, to create the jobs companies needed things like capital on their balance sheet, equipment for someone to use or operate, etc. We no longer live in a labor intensive economy.
