Quote from: RoadTrain on September 13, 2014, 11:19:54 PM

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I say, "create new currency" and you say, "debt issuance" or "deficit spending". They are the same, except the terms you use make it unnecessarily complex sounding.

No, they aren't the same.

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A child can understand that the same effort went into both scenarios, but that scenario #2 resulted in additional net wealth. You don't need to argue with me, the empirical evidence proves that Socialism is complete bullshit.

You missed my point.

Scenario #1: People are unemployed.
Net effect: poverty, human capital depreciation.

Scenario #2: People are digging ditches.
Net effect: we have ditches, poverty is reduced, still human capital depreciation.

Scenario #3: People are building infrastructure: roads, bridges, etc...
Net effect: we have improved infrastructure, human capital is preserved, poverty is reduced.

I prefer the third scenario, while you seem to prefer the first.

While the 3rd scenario does sound good on paper, in reality it is not. The fact is that government is worse at spending money then the private sector is (in other words it is spent less efficiently). You imply that the government would pay for all this which means that taxpayer money would not be spent efficiently (all money that government spends will eventually be paid for by taxpayers), unless you are part of the 47% who pay no taxes and rely exclusively on government you should care about this. For example the 2009 stimulus package that president Obama and the democrats passed ended up costing around $300,000 per ~$40,000 per year job created as a result of the stimulus.

Another problem is that you assume that we need more/better infrastructure. In many cases we do not and the money would be spent on things that would not even be used. One example of this is the $100 billion bullet train to no where in CA. Not only is the project expected to generate vastly less amounts of revenue then it will cost to build, but it is estimated to be greatly underutilized.