Jophiel wrote:
Private sector companies are sitting on around two trillion dollars in capital and showing no interest in expanding their payrolls.
Uh huh. Because of government policies that have made domestic employment less attractive. Chiefly among them has been massive overspending. Surely you can see how a plan involving yet more spending isn't going to help?
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In fact, tech companies are some of the worst offenders for this,
Then give them incentives to spend that money employing people. The solution is remarkably simple, but it doesn't involve bigger government, so you refuse to see it.
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There is no reason to believe that putting infrastructure spending money into the private sector would result in better job growth and a good reason to believe that it won't.
And once again we have a liberal reversing the order of money flow! How predictable.
We're not "putting infrastructure spending money into the private sector" Joph. What Obama will be proposing is the exact opposite: "Taking money from the private sector and spending it on infrastructure". Why do you liberals always have to lie when you talk about where the money is coming from and where it's going? You know damn well that the money is being sat upon in the private sector. You even said it two sentences ago. Yet, in an amazing display of subconscious indoctrination, you automatically reverse the direction. Do you honestly not realize when you do this?
Why not simply remove the things that are holding the private sector back and let them do what they do best? Isn't that a much better solution than creating conditions in which they are hesitant to invest in jobs, then blaming them for not investing in jobs, then using that as an excuse to take the money from them to create the jobs you want in a manner which is measurably less efficient than if you'd just not created those poor hiring conditions in the first place? I think so. It's just amazing to me that so many people buy this process and think it's perfectly ok.
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If the idea is to promote growth through moving money (directly or indirectly), I'd go with the more certain return on infrastructure spending with its associated benefits in roads, etc over putting the money into the private sector and watching them hold onto it.
Except that's incredibly short sighted. That money that the private sector is sitting on, is the wealth accumulated from saving up the profits from the fruits of the labors of their employers in the past. It's a one time commodity Joph. Once you seize it and spend it, it wont exist anymore. So once you've paid those infrastructure employees to work for a couple years and the money runs out, what then? Now unemployment will jump up again, and you wont have a tax base to draw on to keep spending more money on infrastructure jobs, and the private sector will have less money to invest in real productive jobs.
It's a mistake. Perhaps if we'd not frittered away so much money on liberal boondoogles with the first round of stimulus measures, $300B allocated the way Obama is likely to propose would be fine. But in the context of that earlier wasted spending, and the current debt situation, it's going to end out being good money following bad. At this point, the best thing to do is everything we can to get that private sector money invested directly into jobs. Not taken by the government, but jobs that will generate not only lower unemployment, and not only income for the workers, but also profits for the companies that employ them. That's the only way to create sustainable job growth.
Any other solution at this point is purely about temporarily treating the symptoms today at the cost of real economic recovery tomorrow. It was a bad idea to do this 2 years ago. It's a *really* bad idea to do it again today. If Obama comes out with that message tomorrow, it will be very very poorly received.