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When the government spends a million dollars building a bridge, it creates a bunch of jobs because people need to design the bridge, extract the raw materials f
by natnat 15y ago
When the government spends a million dollars building a bridge, it creates a bunch of jobs because people need to design the bridge, extract the raw materials for the bridge, and build the bridge.
When the government spends a million dollars building a bomb, it also creates a bunch of jobs for the same reason.
The thing is, a bridge gets you a useful public resource that makes lost of people's lives better and encourages economic growth by making trade easier. A bomb blows up, kills some people, and disappears.
- encoderer 15y agoAbsolutely, no question. It's the same argument that econonmists make against acceptance of a so-called "service based economy" -- if I pay you $200,000 to build me a house, you've got $200,000 and I've got a house worth $200,000. If I pay you $100 to clean my house, you've got $100, and all I've got is a clean house. Nice, but there's no market value. There's no multiplier effect. But there is SOME utility to the gov't injecting capital in the form of military spending. As I mentioned in the comment below yours, the most extreme example of that is WWII, which finally and permanently ended the Great Depression, in a way that the WPA/etc building bridges just did not.