Jonathan Chait on the need for government spending, wasteful or not:
The point of stimulus spending… is simply to spend money–on something useful if possible, wasteful if necessary. Keynes proposed burying money in mineshafts, so that workers would be hired to dig it out. (Imagine what the GOP could do with material like that.) World War II was an effective stimulus that, economically speaking, consisted of 100 percent waste. If war hadn’t broken out, we could have enjoyed the same economic benefit by building all those tanks and planes and dumping them into the ocean.
1 Comment
February 16, 2009 at 3:39 pm
That is a great quote and really paints a clear image of the concept of economic stimulus. It seems like WWII is often presented as this economic blessing in disguise. The reality is, as Chait points out, that it was not the war that stimulated the economy, it was the spending.