Mott's Blog

To my surprise, Republicans in the House found their voice....finally. They united with some Democrats who flipped to oppose the trillion dollar boondoggle bill. Last year, before the financial woes, pork barrel was a bad name....now it is the answer to all of our problems if you believe the Left. Uh...excuse me the "post-partisan progressives" as they now want to be called. The Heritage Foundation has an excellent article echoing my arguments of the futility of using public works spending to create jobs and economic growth. http://www.heritage.org/research/budget/bg2208.cfm It might be helpful to remember that Hoover's first response to the Great Depression was to enormously increase federal public works spending. FDR picked this up with a fervor and nothing worked to reverse the problems for more than a decade. Good arguments can be made that economic polices of that era lengthened the depression. Let's go to work creating new investment in long-term better paying...

Randy M. Mott To allay concerns that they are “tax and spend” liberals, for several years the American Left has referred to government spending on infrastructure or education as an “investment.” In a philosophical sense this is accurate, but it does not change the character or effects of such spending. The Obama Administration coming into office promising to create a massive number of new jobs by government spending programs. Historical data overwhelmingly supports the opposite conclusion, the net effect of government spending is neutral at best and more frequently negatively correlated to employment. While we can “hope” that this broad body of empirical research is wrong, that is unlikely to “change” the results for future spending plans. Another corollary to the liberal creed is that anything stimulating business investment is a “trickle-down” theory that does not work for the poor and middle class: a notion equally at odds with all empirical data. These twin myths remain part of...