[snapplebobapple]

What I said is a subset of what you are claiming and it's the actually true part. There are lots of investments that increase productive capacity that are bad on pretty much any sane metric (i.e bridges to nowhere, sweetheart deals for new professional sports stadium construction, speculative factory subsidies, especially in rapidly evolving technology fields like the travesty that happened in solar panel manufacture a few years ago).

[bryanlarsen]

No you said "s(mething thatcpays higher yields than tge debt service or possibly inlfation cost"

That's nowhere close to the same thing. Productive assets like road infrastructure often has no payback because the government gives them away for free.

And the reason we're losing to China is because China invested in hundreds of Solyndras. You're learning the wrong lesson from Solyndra.