Yes, and it also tends to direct that capital to places with high return on investment that the private sector wouldn't bother with. Public schools come to mind; the return on investment of having an educated workforce is immense, but what sane venture capitalist would put money into schools? The only way to make money off of a school is to sell your graduates into indentured servitude.Count Chocula wrote:You DO realize that "return of investment" is based on the investment of capital, that is, unencumbered assets? Government spending can not be classified as an investment in any other than a parochial sense, as all funds disbursed by virtue of government spending have their sources in present or future taxation, which reduces the pool of available capital.
There are a lot of things that produce enormous return on investment... just not to the investor themself. Which is where government steps in. If I were a venture capitalist, I might have 30 or 40% less money to invest because of taxes, yes. But what's the alternative? I might not have a goddamn nickel to invest if I didn't live in a country with schools, highways, a competent military, and a social safety net strong enough to keep the poor from getting desperate and deciding to start rioting in the streets.
"Return on investment" does not equal "The size of my personal dividend check."
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Is there something wrong with me that I find this metaphor hilarious?Pulp Hero wrote:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/ ... -lies.html
...But yesterday, someone told a real whopper. ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol. By the time this figure reached Michelle Malkin, however, it had been blown up to 2,000,000. There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That's not a twofold or threefold exaggeration -- it's roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.
The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.
I was there too. If it hadn't been for all the advanced crowd planning, people would have died. Hell, maybe I would have died; it is not inconceivable that I would have been shoved onto the subway tracks by the sheer press of the crowd while going into the city.Malkin herself did not lie; she merely repeated a lie. It does not particularly call into question her character. It does, however, call into question her judgment. The reason is that if there had in fact been 2 million protesters in Washington yesterday, there would have been no need to lie about it -- the magnitude of the protests would have been self-evident. I was in Washington for the inauguration, an event at which there really were almost 2 million people present -- and let me tell you, it was a Holy Mess. Hotels, charging double or treble their usual rates, were booked weeks in advance. Major stations on the Metro system were shut down for hours at a time. The National Guard was brought in. At least 3,000 people got stuck in a tunnel. Essentially the entirely of the National Mall, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, was dotted with onlookers. Heaps of trash were left behind. The entire city was basically a warzone for a period of about 20 hours, from midnight through mid-evening...
No way was there a comparable level of crowd control in DC for this new rally. If nothing else, a lot of the "I can't tell the difference between Obama and Hitler" crowd would probably have taken one look at all those soldiers and cops, pulled out guns (you know some of them were carrying) and started shooting.
So if there were two million people, where are the mounds of corpses from all the black-helicopter people who fell under trains or suffocated in the crowd when people got lost and started stampeding in the wrong direction?
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Side note: Australia has a population of around 21.9 million. The US is roughly 14 times larger. So all else being equal, a correspondingly large helping of per capita debt would give the US government a budget deficit of nearly two trillion dollars. And that's starting from a balanced budget, which we didn't have to begin with because the previous record for biggest deficits in American history had been set in just the past few years by the Bush administration during a good economy.Lusankya wrote:Let's look at a country with a relatively sensible government. Say Australia. It's also the western country that weathered the GFC the best, so its economic problems are much lower than those of other countries. The Federal Government was regularly about $10bn in surplus for 10 years prior to the last budget, so you can't say that they were recklessly spending or anything like that...
Anyway, along comes the GFC. Even Australia, which was buffered from the effects by our strong trade with China, Indonesia and India found the economy shrinking for two consecutive quarters and had unemployment rise. In response, the government launched their stimulus package and the budget went from a $10bn surplus to a $120bn defecit - so a difference of about $130bn...
We were crashing into debt during the fat years, so I doubt anyone should be surprised that we have to crash into debt during the thin years, too.
