All borrowed money spent stimulates the economy in the short run. Apollo
can be considered as a war on the moon- it stimulated the economy; there
were spin-offs as well, but the main direct outcome from that was a bunch
of mostly useless junk lying underwater. Spending money on war where you
kill people, also stimulates the economy.
Any time anyone is borrowing money to do something, that stimulates the
economy, the money goes into wages, and that goes into spending on goods,
and that ripples out through the economy and the economy increases; but at
some point the borrower has to pay it back. And when you do that, that
reduces the economy again; but that's later.
So war definitely stimulates the economy in the short run, but the
government ends up with debts that reduces the economy in the long run. In
the depths of a deep depression or recession, the evidence is that the
government spending can, even spent on war, effectively end or greatly
ameliorate an recession. When the economy is back on its feet, it can then
gradually bring the debt back down; this reduces the economy, but it does
it more gently, when the economy can handle it.
But governments are always better off, in the long run, spending the money
instead on something more useful and persistent, that people tend to value.
For example, spending it on wind turbines and power infrastructure or
launch systems, or electric cars; in the long run, the government could tax
back the ongoing value that results. You can argue that wind turbines or
launch systems are, or are not optimal use of money, but compared to war,
they're enormously better.
On 30 December 2015 at 16:53, Rand Simberg <simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wars do not "stimulate the economy." They destroy wealth.
On 2015-12-29 15:23, Monroe L. King Jr. wrote:
All the war we have been in since WWII are economic wars
There is no winner and it's intended to be that way.
It's about moving money around yes.
They learned that from the Korean war and have used it to stimulate the
economy ever since.
Money that goes into war filters out into the country.
It looks bad on the deficet of course but that works double in their
favor if they can keep the public believing it's necessary
War stimulates our country's economy it's pretty simple.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [AR] Re: OT economy booster
From: "John Dom" <johndom@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, December 29, 2015 2:53 pm
To: <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, 29 Dec 2015, John Dom wrote:
War is an economy booster. War makes money, jobs ect...
Usually only if you win the war...
On Behalf Of Henry Spencer 291215:
Often not even then. The money still has to come from somewhere, and agovernment can only extract so much from its citizens before things fall
apart. WW1 devastated Britain's economy, and the beginnings of WW2
finished
it off -- Britain was quite literally *bankrupt* at the end of February
1941. The Lend-Lease Agreement and some other outside help postponed the
problem for the rest of the war, but times were hard in Britain for years
afterward -- food rationing continued until 1954 -- and it needed several
decades to fully recover.
Next came Suez and J.F. Dulles’s coup de grâce to Eden.