> The government used to be able to spur all sorts of economic gains that way, from huge dams generating cheap electricity to the interstate highway system. Now

> The government used to be able to spur all sorts of economic gains that way, from huge dams generating cheap electricity to the interstate highway system. Now we vaporize $800 billion (ARRA stimulus program) and barely get anything for it. There's a big whopping [citation needed] right here. The fact that the stimulus was unaccountable wasted money is a canard that people with an agenda (and a willingness to ignore facts) like to tell themselves. There have been a multitude of studies estimating the impact of ARRA,and the consensus almost across the board has been positive: several macro firms (Moody, IHS) estimate that the ARRA saved around 2.5m jobs total (up to 2014), and the CBO and other economists estimate that more than 3m jobs were saved by 2011 alone. Note that I'm leaving out any Democratic or White House sources (who had even more positive estimates), to avoid the possibility that they're politically biased. Hell the best the Republicans could do in their campaign-fodder "list of most wasteful stimulus projects" was TWO PERCENT of the ARRA's total. Even if the Act hadn't done anything useful (which it did), it's widely considered by economists to have prevented a much deeper recession, which alone is obviously worth the expense. In the event that you're focusing not on its overall effectiveness but on the fact that nothing "visible" was built (like a big dam): 1) That's an awfully juvenile way to measure impact ("I don't see big concrete structures going up everywhere! The money must have 'vaporized'!"). 2) The ARRA consisted of a huge amount of tax cuts (36% of the 800B), so if you're going to claim that 800B "vaporized", you need to account for the extra productivity from the income effect from those tax cuts. 3) It's very disingenuous to completely ignore context: if our freeways are crumbling and we build shiny new ones instead of maintaining the old ones (which was a significant provision of the ARRA), that would be a pretty stupid idea. And yet, by your metric, that would be preferable in order to have a visible impact. 4) A big chunk of the ARRA was explicitly designed to fill in huge municipal/state-level spending cuts that were choking off local economies (there were towns that were actually shutting their police/other critical services down). If local economies cut N billion and the ARRA replaced that N billion, the ignorant response would be "SEE WE DIDN'T GET ANYTHING FOR N BILLION". I really hope I don't have to explain why comparing against the situation before instead of comparing against the situation that _would_ have occurred absent the ARRA is absolutely idiotic (this was also an issue when people were assessing the macreconomic effect of the Act). TL;DR: It's an awfully simple-minded approach to say "Where are all the big new fancy buildings??? We barely got anything for the ARRA!". It ignores the tax cuts in the Act, privileges new construction over needed maintenance/upgrades, ignores spending on electronic systems (EMR, etc), ignores the effect of sustaining local spending after huge cuts. It's honestly the _worst_ metric for the usefulness or "economic gain" of an act that I've ever seen.