"I know how to spend your money better than you do!"

To the people who think they can spend the government’s money better than the government.

To the left who explains that X amount of schools and hospitals could have been built with the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the right who thinks the Stimulus would have been better spent if $50,000 were given to each individual…

…WE WOULD STILL HAVE SPENT THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY AND WE WOULD STILL HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF DEBT!

I don’t know how the discussion of the debt should include these arguments. “We spent a lot of money and now we are in the hole. We should have spent a lot of money!” It bothers me when someone discussing the debt has to add that statistic of how many computers for children could have been bought with the amount spent on the Iraq War. Just say something like “Iraq was an unnecessary war that drained the resources of this nation” without adding “but here is another unnecessary expense that would have cost the same amount but pretend that wouldn’t contribute to the debt!” Just stick to the argument that it was an unfunded war.

Even if you did spend that money on a million schools, we would still have to pay to run those schools! That would cost even more in the long run! Of course, you could just build them without ever using them, which would be a huge waste!

To the right, why is it that the people most against government spending like this idea of giving every middle class person (In America, EVERYONE thinks they are middle class…) $50,000? “Government handouts don’t work, but I think government handouts will work!” These people bitch and complain when someone get $800 a month ($9,600 a year) or their kids get free school lunches, but have no problem with the government giving out 50 grand for a one time stimulus. Safety net=evil, money to blow=great! Look at this website touting this idea. I found some flaws in their reasoning:

“Jane needs a car; she spends $5,000 on a used one because she doesn’t want spend it all.” Who is going to have that kind of self control? How many Lottery winners blow through their money really quickly? How many celebrities with hundreds of millions of dollars have blown through their cash? *cough* Mike Tyson… *cough* MC Hammer…

“Joe buys a TV. Wal Mart makes money, Magnavox makes money. Everyone is happy.” How long could this stimulus last? Blowing this money on TVs, cars, boats, and other worthless luxury items you don’t need will only be a short term fix that would put us back at square one. Now that everyone has a big screen plasma TV, no one will need a TV for awhile, which means the industry will slow down. Economics 101. The market will be saturated and will crash (too many refrigerators, cars, and radios sat on the shelf/on the lot in the 1920s which caused the economy to nosedive in ’29. Too many video games caused that market to crash in ’83). $50,000 could cover a $1000 a month mortgage for about four years. Then what? Saving money will be good in the long term, but it won’t help in the short term.

I now have a plasma TV, a state of the art entertainment system, a high-end car, and every game system in the word. But I still have no job and my house will soon be foreclosed. After seeing a slight boom, industries will slow down again. Great idea! Do we need another stimulus/bailout?