bobbolink (1000+ posts) Thu Mar-03-11 09:55 PM
Original message
"our budget didn't get into this mess because we spent too much money on poor people! "
Jim Wallis continues: "And cutting programs that help the most vulnerable (which are among the most cost-effective and least costly public spending we have) isn't going to get us out of financial trouble, or reduce the deficit in ways that we now need. Excessive deficits are indeed a moral issue and they place crushing burdens on our children and grandchildren. But how we reduce the deficit is also a moral issue."
For every federal dollar spent on food stamps, $1.84 is returned to the local economy.
Subsidized housing brings in MILLIONS to the local economy, AND creates jobs. Yadda, yadda, yadda...
The problem with this stupid Pelosi-think is that it completely ignores the opportunity cost of taking that dollar away from the person who earned it, thereby PREVENTING $1.84 in economic activity (Even using their stupid assumptions about the right multiplier).
It's actually worse than a zero-sum game:
1. They have to take quite a bit more than a dollar from the taxpayer to pay out $1.00 in benefits, because of the frictional loss caused by both the tax collection structure and the benefit distribution structure, both of which provide government jobs but have a negative value for the economy as a whole.
2. Discounting the fact that the recipients use a variety of barters and other evasions to buy drugs and booze, ultimately the money they receive gets spent on basic commodities, even if not necessarily by the intended recipients. However, in the hands of the original taxpayers, they would have been dollars at the top end of the taxpayer's income, and therefore probably spent on non-commodity consumer goods like cars, computers, furniture, or media systems that would have been of vastly more regenerative value to the economy.