Can we stop with the Paul Krugman posts already?

[dawg]

72. I have had clients with businesses based entirely on winning large government contracts.

Likewise, just going about the business of upgrading our national infrastructure would create tons of new jobs and lead to many, many new businesses being formed.

Instead, this senseless notion of austerity leads us to leave millions of people unemployed, and the crucial maintenance of our infrastructure undone, at a time when there is a huge excess labor pool to do the work, and we can borrow at incredibly low rates in order to finance the improvements.

But no, we'll just let our bridges and highways and port systems continue to degrade because ..... deficits!!

This is short-sighted thinking. You are a very intelligent person, and right about a lot of things, but you are falling just short of seeing the whole picture. And I don't mean that as an insult ... you think exactly the way I did just a few short years ago.

The biggest misconception that you have, is that you still believe money and debt are "real". They are not real. They are accounting fictions - useful in managing trade within an economy, but they do not represent the real wealth of a nation.

The real wealth of the nation is the value of the goods and services produced by it's people each day. The real losses occur on a day that a plant sits idle or a worker sits at home and does not produce. Until a time machine is invented, there is no way to get that lost productivity back.

If we can, by means of manipulating those dollars and debts, get that worker to instead spend his day making something useful for society, we should by all means do so. The wealth of the nation will have been increased by whatever it is that he produces.