Posted on 04/12/2010 9:42:48 AM PDT by Revelation 911
If the former, not likely. If the latter, absolutely.
eh - Im no fan personally - freepmail me and I’ll send you a jar of my brand www.holy-smokes.biz
“Build it and they will come.”
My reaction exactly. This is the inherent problem with tax-financed “investments.” Politicians are quite skilled at over-promising and under-delivering—not because they are bad people (though some surely are), but mostly because of the incentives built into the system. Unlike entrepreneurs, who are either putting at risk their own personal capital or trying to convince someone to VOLUNTARILY invest capital, politicians are using taxes that are forcibly extracted from taxpayers. Americans especially don’t particularly like paying taxes, so politicians have every incentive to underestimate the amount of taxes required for a project and/or to bury the true cost in a complex system of cross-subsidies (e.g., Obamacare personified).
Conversely, politicians want to get re-elected, so they always are prone to exaggerate the future benefits of whatever they’re spending the public’s money to provide. Think about the contrast about all of Obama’s absurd promises about what he would do and how responsibly he would spend our money (”I’ll go line-by-line through the federal budget to cut out programs that don’t work”) versus how things turned out in real life after he was elected.
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