Economic downturns, Mr. Keynes and Mr. Samuelson taught us, occur when the aggregate demand for goods and services is insufficient.
Higher consumer spending expands aggregate demand further, raising the G.D.P. yet again. And so on. This positive feedback loop is called the multiplier effect.
these Keynesian prescriptions make avoiding depressions seem too easy.
each dollar of government spending can increase the nation’s gross domestic product by more than a dollar
The solution, they said, was for the government to provide demand when the private sector would not.
less than a third of the increase takes the form of private consumption and investment.
Professor Ramey estimates that each dollar of government spending increases the G.D.P. by only 1.4 dollars.
In practice, however, the multiplier for government spending is not very large
If you hire your neighbor for $100 to dig a hole in your backyard and then fill it up, and he hires you to do the same in his yard, the government statisticians report that things are improving.
it is unlikely that, having wasted all that time digging and filling, either of you is better off.
inefficient spending
bridges to nowhere,
increase in economic well-being.
a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of each government project.
To this day, we have yet to come to grips with how to pay for all that the government created during that era
a temporary crisis as a pretense for engineering a permanent increase in the size and scope of the government. Believers in limited government have reason to be wary.
tax cuts will be a larger piece of the Obama recovery plan than was previously expected.
I am not sure if this has been mentioned before, but Wolfram Alpha is a great website for finding economic and other data. Wonderful charts and diagrams that aggregate information, compare and contrast, etc. It is really worth a look.