riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (12/01/83)
pyuxa!wetcw says: >> I would invite the person who is worried about all >> "those resources" being tied up in silos to go back >> to Economics 101. If all that money is tied up in >> silos, then I had better get out my pickaxe and go digging. >> Dummies, the money spent on ANY project, be it military, >> Social, or Private goes out to the working stiffs. >> ... >> Please don't cry about the money being spent and sitting in the >> ground. Whatever is in those silos represents literally hundreds >> of thousands of jobs. Sigh. The same old silly arguments again. No one is claiming that there is literally money tied up in missile silos, but the resources on which the money was spent -- land, energy, man-years -- are gone. Money isn't our problem. (If it were, we could always print more.) But resources, and particularly the resources which people are willing to see allocated as taxes by the government and then consumed to meet national goals, are finite. The point is that the "hundreds of thousands of jobs" and the accompanying material resources which now go into useless instruments of war would serve a useful purpose if they were spent instead on things like health, education, housing and food. (And if you're still set on dwelling on the trickle-down effects of the money spent rather than on the resources which that money represents, those who've had more than Economics 101 point out that more jobs result dollar-for-dollar from non-military expenditures than from military ones.) As someone recently said in another discussion, if ideas like these were true, then we could just pass a single dollar around enough times and feed the whole world. Unfortunately you can't eat money. ---- Prentiss Riddle {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle riddle@ut-sally.UUCP
wetcw@pyuxa.UUCP (12/02/83)
Exactly how do you use the current output of steel tonage per year to bolster health, education, and welfare? What do we do with the unemployed due to cutbacks in spending for government contracts? We just went through a period of high unemployment and reccession due to cutbacks during the last year of Jimmy Carter's reign. My contention is that, since the government got into the act of letting huge contracts back in the 30's, we are hard pressed to find other ways to keep the money moving. As for resources being used, you are right. However, resources can be recycled, thus providing more employment. I don't recall mentioning military contracts. I am talking about space. There are too many lines of research open in space to ignore. We could start with mining on the moon. Far fetched? I think not considering we already have the knowledge. Dangerous? so was crossing the Atlantic in 1492. By creating more jobs, more money flows, more taxes are paid, more money is available to address the problems of health, education, and welfare. Sounds simple, but a full explanation of how the system works would need too much storage on the net. Borrowing is not the answer to providing government funds. An equitable tax system, with as full an employment situation as possible, allows for much greater flexibility in planning for HEW. Huge, dumb idea, contracts allow this to happen. This can be extended in many directions to later cut the dependence on government contracts and return the economy to the private sector. Till then, I will vote for major spending on large contracts, even if they be military in nature, but I would rather see space exploration our prime concern. The future may depend on it. T. C. Wheeler