Riet said:
Why?
Before you answer that, consider this:
a) It's an economic stimulus package. We're heading for a recession. You stop/dampen recessions by releasing economic and infrastructure stimulus. E.g. tax cuts, interest rate cuts, one-off handouts, healthcare funding, education funding, infrastructure spending.
b) In a recession, the people who suffer most are the low to middle socioeconomic groups (
who also make up the bulk of consumers) because less money for them is more likely to mean less money for food, petrol, electricity, bills, etc, while less money for the rich just means less desire to keep up with the joneses (holidays, plasma TVs, new clothes, and plastic surgery). Coincidentally, this is also the
exact reason for progressive tax instead of the flat tax which Liberals and less hardcore Libertarians favour... and they wonder why I call them selfish social Darwinists.
c) Continuing from b), the people who suffer most during a recession (working class Joe Blow) are the people who are most important to keep the economy running from
day to day. Those well-off accountants, computer programmers, bankers, and lawyers might be vital to
maintaining a well-oiled market democracy in the long-term - but it's the builders/repairmen, nurses, teachers, farmers, and shop assistants which the country
cannot function even one week without. So
without working class economic stimulus it goes like this: America crashes -> Australian working class start focusing on daily expenses instead of consumption -> economy slows -> some of the working class laid off to balance the books -> more strain on social security system -> less consumers means economy slows even further -> good game positive feedback system -> economy collapses (depression).
With that in mind, I'd like you to provide me a reason other than "it's a waste because it's 'redistributing wealth' with 'taxpayer dollars'". Because yes, damn fucking right
our government is spending its taxpayer money to redistribute wealth to those who are most vulnerable during an economic
crisis. It's spending it because 'taxpayer dollars' are a portion of wealth which Australians
decided to forfeit to government over a hundred years ago, during the impending doom of the Long Depression, in an effort to empower government with the ability to make the kind of holistic-and-prescient broad economic actions, as an
actual rational agent, which an individual market agent (the taxpayer) alone could not because of a mix of bounded rationality, imperfect information, and the prisoner dilemma (sorry about that laissez faire
).
So in light of the potential magnitude of this most recent economic crash, I think it is terribly fitting that 'taxpayer dollars' are being proactively spent to guard against the
very thing (depression) which catalysed the creation of the modern Australian (progressive) tax system in the first place. That such proactive spending
also redistributes wealth because it is targeted at the most vulnerable should be cause for
joy, as it is particularly true to Australian egalitarianism... But if it is not, let me fall back to appeal to selfishness: think of it as applying extra metal sheeting to the most rusty point on the hull; even if it doesn't 'deserve' the extra protection because it rusted and you didn't, wouldn't opposing it because of that be oxidative suicide? I can't see how death would promote your oxidative Darwinism ideology, and anyway miss Raynd, if you were a
real oxidative Darwinist,
you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss altruism.
N.B. BTW, this post is a sort of a preemptive response to Schroe, ari, Kwayera, and any random (probably Libertarian) berk who doesn't understand why governments spend more during economic crisis. Not not not just a massive overreaction to one, admittedly short-sighted, sentence on your part, Riet. Also, I'm not a phet binge.
Oh, speaking of Libertarianism, I have a funny article from 1997.
This is for you, Schroe. 
