Field Runners and Paul Krugman

If you watch the news or pick up a paper or anything of the sort, you have seen in the last few weeks talk of the possible stimulus plan.  I believe the super-uplifting name we are calling it now is either American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan or Where’d All the Monies Go?  I don’t remember which.

If you want the down and dirty on the possibilities floating out there, I recommend you read 2008 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Paul Krugman’s New York Times column or his blog.  Much of what he writes is so marked by clarity that I wonder why I didn’t get what he writes about on my own.  He is that good at making sense of all of these trillions flying around the world.  It has been his opinion as of late that the numbers that Team Obama have been floating are going to be insufficient to fill the vast void that is this economic slowdown.  His best estimate right now shows that the stimulus plan as proposed will only serve to reduce the problem by a third over the next 2-5 years.

Krugman further points out that the plan includes far too much money for ineffective tax cuts.  If you want to know the capabilities of tax cuts to taxpayers and businesses to effectively save the economy, I refer you to the last eight years.  Instead,  many economists are showing numbers that suggest for every dollar spent by the government there is a 1.5 dollar effect on the gross domestic product.  This number got me thinking about an hour ago while I was playing a popular iPhone game in between grading papers.  

Field Runners

Field Runners is one of those games where I have to stop the little enemies marching from one side of the screen to the other.  For each enemy I kill I profit a specified amount of money that I can then turn into more gun emplacements on the map.  Stay with me, I swear this is about the US economy.

After have played half way through I decided to make a sandwich and just let the game run for a few minutes.  I had a pretty sound maze of guns set up and I didn’t think I’d let any little guys make it across.  I though to myself, Well when I come back I’ll have a big chunk of cash and I can make some sweeping changes.  Really build up the end of my maze.  This is where Paul Krugman entered the picture.

Krugman talks about “shovel ready” projects frequently when discussing alternatives to tax cuts that will probably just end up in the bank or used to pay off credit card debt.  Shovel ready means that if given the money, project supervisors could start building whatever it is they are building within six months to a year.  Awhile back I wrote about the idea of high speed rail in America and how that idea excited me.  With the government about to spend Lots and Lots of money we don’t have, I’d like to see some sweeping changes.  

The second largest economy in the world is Japan; Germany is the third.  When these nations decide to make sweeping changes like the Eisenhower Interstate system was here in the 50’s, they do not have as much ground to cover.  Yes, they have other challenges but my point is that the distances don’t seem so astronomical.  Here in America sweeping changes cross four time zones and go through 200 subcommittees it seems.

Five years ago, there would be little chance for high speed rail or any other great national project to get 1-5 billion dollars.  Much like in my iPod Touch/iPhone game, most of the time we operate by spending little amounts of money to add on little improvements; just enough to keep us ahead of the game.  In five to ten years time the US economy is going to have to be robust enough to start paying back some of these many monies we are about to spend.  There will just be no room for the government to spend the billions necessary to complete projects like these.  As long as we are going to spend the stimulus, I am hoping that we can use it on something as monumental as the US Interstate System was in its day, rather than spending it on Best Buy gift cards and Vera Bradley hand bags, shudder.