Quote Originally Posted by East River Guide View Post
No. You seem to think government spending creates growth. Every dollar the govt spends is taken from somewhere else where it is likely doing more good. You can make a colorable claim that during certain short periods govt spending may provide a buffer of some kind, but only at the cost of reduced future growth.
Most entitlements get spent as consumer dollars - consumer spending is like 70% of the economy. I think this creates more jobs than some corporation buying a synthetic CDO betting on how someone else's portfolio is going to move. Almost all entitlement dollars handed out this month are sitting on business's balance sheets next month.

The problem is everyone got greedy and worked to pump a lot of borrowed money into the system and we now have an economy dependent on those borrowed dollars and where a huge amount of government revenue is used to pay interest on that debt. The only way to correct this is to shrink the economy which will break a system which requires ever increasing growth. Capitalism functions on boom and bust, I don't think we're going to be able to play the numbers to avoid the bust, although austerity is more of a controlled crash.