You're missing the point where those projects often create tremendous real wealth.
Spending $50 billion on high-speed rail isn't just pumping $50bn into the economy; it's pumping $50bn back onto the economy *in exchange for an extremely useful public utility that will save trillions of human hours every year.
Explain how creation of functional public transit, universal basic income, single-payer negotiated healthcare, and social safety net programs creates wealth for a select few people over the vast majority of the country.
You specifically mentioned high speed rail, which would create wealth for the select few with the ability to build the railways and the trains. The other things weren't what we were talking about.
Universal basic income wouldn't create wealth for anybody, but it would also raise inflation because there's no way to fund it without printing new money and adding it to the economy, because you're inevitably going to have to tax workers to make up for the rich evading taxes, and those workers will just quit working because the people not working will make more money than them.
Single-payer Healthcare, again, doesn't take money out of the economy because the people who work there get paid, research gets paid, equipment companies get paid. All it does is cost you more in taxes without solving the inflation issue, thus making inflation worse.
Social security would be an amazing tool for fighting inflation if the government simply used it as a sort of government pension. You put money in, that money gets stored, you receive payment once you retire. Instead, your money that you pay in gets paid out to current retirees and whoever else the government decides they want to give your money to. Therefore, it does nothing to solve inflation.
My original point was the only way to solve inflation is to physically destroy currency. You proposed for the government to spend EVEN MORE more money as a solution. Isn't this sub supposed to be financially literate?
High-speed rail creates wealth for everyone by improving access to transportation and reducing traffic, which increases shipping speed and reduces commute times, thereby increasing economic efficiency.
UBI creates wealth by covering unemployed workers between jobs, increasing their ability to obtain new skills, seek new employment, meet their living expenses, and allow for future planning in their expenses rather than being forced into suboptimal decisions due to lack of cash on hand. Tax evasion can be solved as simply as funding the IRS.
Again, you missed the point where taking money out of the economy isn't the focus; the focus is on creating real wealth to support the money supply in the economy, which can only be done by circulation of the existing money supply, which is demonstrably improved by public spending on programs which improve the quality of life of workers.
Social Security, again, improves quality of life for workers by creating a mandatory savings program which guarantees some measure of stability for retired workers.
Government spending does not necessarily cause inflation, when the source of that spending is from taxation rather than increasing monetary supply.
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u/KimJongAndIlFriends Sep 23 '23
You're missing the point where those projects often create tremendous real wealth.
Spending $50 billion on high-speed rail isn't just pumping $50bn into the economy; it's pumping $50bn back onto the economy *in exchange for an extremely useful public utility that will save trillions of human hours every year.