From where does the government get the money it spends in the private sector?

Answer: The private sector.

But I’d also love to learn from you where the money for public-sector employees comes from.

And Charles, if you’re being facetious here — great — but unfortunately about half of this country won’t notice (frown).

When the government spends tax money, it spends it…in the private sector (smile) It gives business to private companies, which has the effect of helping the private sector which is in recession. Government welfare payments, unemployment payments, Medicare, Medicaid, all the New Deal, Great Society programs have the same effect. A poor person spends their welfare money in the PRIVATE SECTOR. So, welfare payments help the private sector recover.

- John Maynard Keynes (smile)

1. Re-read the article. The main point is that no person or group of government officials is anywhere near smart enough to get this right. Hence, it is folly to try, and there’s “plenty of historical precedent” for bad unintended consequences.
2. “Greed” has nothing to do with it. If you have a problem with people wanting $7 T-shirts today, just exactly how would you make sure that people could NOT buy T-shirts for $7? Just what would you say to the customers at WalMart, Target, and wherever who freely and gladly buy T-shirts for $7, therefore leaving cash left over to buy something else?
3. Are the supposedly “greedy” corporations employing slave labor? If they are, I’d be the first to pronounce that as wrong. If on the other hand they’re creating jobs with employees joining voluntarily, raising global standards of living, lifting hundreds of millions of global citizens out of poverty through slow-but-steady wealth creation and thus CREATING POTENTIAL NEW MARKETS for our own exports, just what exactly is your problem with this? Again, propose a better system.
4. Ask the yacht-builders in the Northeast US about what happened when class-warfare legislation attempted to fight “trickle down economics” (ie, attempted to fight reality): Thousands of destroyed jobs, and plenty of egg on the faces of the all-knowing politicians.
5. Bush’s stimulus — agreed: every bit as misguided as Obama’s stimulus, just not quite as big and not as blatantly political (witness Nancy Pelosi saying that stimulus should be “quick and targeted”, and then passing a total pork-fest package with political handouts lasting an entire presidential term).

You forget the last time we spent money on infrastructure (FDR), it resulted in the national highway system, which paved the way (literally) for plenty of corporate growth. Was the private sector going to make those roads?

There are plenty of newsclips, articles, and stories of all the Senate and Governor detractors of the stim (a stim which was initiated by Bush, if you remember), taking their fat checks and posing for the cameras, crowing about the jobs they created in their district (but… by voting NO on the Obama stim). Your argument you only see expensive signs is disingenuous at best. Selective memory is not an excuse for bad politics. Try google.

Taxation of corporations driving business away? Tired argument proven wrong, time and time again. Taxation did not drive manufacturing overseas. Greed did. The greed of the American public’s need to consume, but for roughly the same amount of money they spent back in the 70s. Think about it. In the 70s, you could buy a t-shirt on sale for $7. Nowadays, you can buy a t-shirt on sale, for $7. How can that be? That leads us to the the greed of the corporations themselves, who want to make more money, but spend less, doing it, finding ever cheaper, ever more exploitable work forces to keep up with the US demand for cheap products. “Lower taxes and bring manufacturing back to the US”…? Keep wishing. We all know trickle-down did not reward us with thankful corporations keeping jobs here to take advantage of the Reaganonmics. The Good-Old Reagan years are when the exodus really took full swing. Yes, Dems voted to allow this to happen as well, but take every policy that allowed corporations to do this, and a Republican initiated it.