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by marcosdumay 1162 days ago
There must be some way that a honest government can spend a lot of money improving a country.

The ideas that this decision can not be made in a hurry and that the spending can jump in size too quickly are reasonable. But the ones that there is absolutely nothing better to do with the money, and that most of it will be there in a large crisis when they need to withdraw are both ridiculous.

1 comments

The larger your economy, the more of a financial cushion you should create and the longer your investment horizon needs to become. If you want to have a resilient society anyway. Political pressures though count against it and demagoguery can make it extremely appealing to reap short term benefits at the cost of long term investment in your own society.

It’s why I was really sad to see the Canadian government give up on its Crown corporations. Sure, they got tens of billions of dollars for it. But that wealth took a really long time to acquire in the first place and the market cap of having a complete monopoly can’t have been priced in correctly (otherwise the private market wouldn’t have been all lathered up at the opportunity to take over).