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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: The WSJ on Reaganomics
Message-ID: <1208@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 18-Nov-84 15:00:17 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.1208
Posted: Sun Nov 18 15:00:17 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Nov-84 15:28:01 EST
References: <652@loral.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 28

================
... Back to 
basic economic truth: the cost to the citizenry of government is the
total it SPENDS (plus some), not what it taxes or borrows.
...
================
No it isn't.  When the Government spends money, it transfers money from
one group of people to another.  There is no NET cost to society, since
each dollar transferred can be used to buy something, whether a civil
servant buys it or whether the worker who built an aircraft buys it.
In the case of a deficit, poor taxpayers transfer wealth to the rich
who loaned the money in the first place, when they pay interest.  But
originally, the rich transferred the money to the poor when they loaned
it.
  Are forced loans good for those who accept them?  Sometimes yes,
sometimes no, but it can hardly be good when most of the interest is
paid by accepting yet more loans ... ask anyone who has used a loan-shark
how that works!  Reaganomics has been super-Keynsian in forcing the
depression to stop by incurring extraordinary deficits, and super-damaging
by drawing much of the loaned money from other countries through
unnatural real interest rates.  There will indeed be a cost to US
society, and perhaps a greater cost to the rest of the world, but it
isn't due simply to how much the Government SPENDS.
-- 

Martin Taylor
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