Is the US headed towards a socialist government?

[Jester]

The risk here is that what the government decides is needed, really is not needed, which is another name for boondoggle.

And the failure rate for businesses is 0%?

If people are spending their own cash to take their own risks in business, then there is no point worrying about the failure rate. If there is a chance that businesses produce that which people do not need, and go bust, then the businessperson should have thought of that beforehand.

But, if you're taking about how to use government money to stimulate the economy, if you give a tax break to a widget producer to hire someone, and then nobody wants widgets, that's money that's been thrown away exactly as surely as if the government hired a hole-digger-filler-inner. "The market" is not a flawless allocator of resources when they're being given a giant external shock like a pure cash injection *not distributed according to market critieria*. You're just as likely, maybe more likely, to get a boondoggle there as in infrastructure spending.

Contrariwise, what the government is spending on right now is not holes and their refilling, but mostly infrastructure. What are the chances that people aren't going to need their bridges fixed, their roads repaired, their kids educated, their electrical grid modernized? Pretty slim, I'd say.

This is the package, at least from the quick google search. Now, you can yak all you want in the abstract about how government spends money inefficiently, but these are the places this money is going, and it all looks pretty sensible to me.

-Jester