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[Jervill]

Election Projection is owned by an avowed hard-right Republican, so although the Presidential and Senate numbers are simply just aggregate data, the House rankings are based more on personal assumptions (lack of concrete data, too many races).  I find it hard to believe Dems would not pick up 5-10 seats at least, probably max out at 20, considering many of those seats the GOP picked up were in a wave year.  Take that site with a huge grain of salt.

[GoombaGeek]

Wait, there's seats too, not just the President?

[Karnewarrior]

Not one that matters.

I kind of wish we could abolish all parties and have everyone run on their own, but apparently people around here think that's communism(?).

Also, a vote for either side wouldn't lead to a police state, it's only if one party has the power for several consecutive presidents. I'm voting for Obama, since from what I've seen spending by the government got us out of the Great Depression. Specifically, the Hoover Dam, IIRC. Obama doesn't have a megaproject lined up though and no matter how good his ideas are if the reps have any chance of knocking them down they'll do it and bash him for not getting anything done.

http://www.jillstein.org/

pay more attention.

Unfortunately her chances of doing anything at all during this election are nil. Partially because people have "the devil you know" idea keeping them from jumping at new things, and partially because America is shallow as all hell and her vice presidential candidate looks like a walrus.

[Nadaka]

Well, it is one of the few sites I have found that actually do a roundup and projection for the house and senate.

[Reelya]

World War II spending sealed the deal for ending the depression, before that, politics hampered most big project spending, like hitting the accelerator so softly that you can't overcome friction. The Hoover Dam etc helped with jobs in the short term, and it gave a renewable resource down the track, but there wasn't enough investment to break the cycle.

Mind you, in World War II, a lot of the spending was deliberate waste - wasting fuel, dropping bombs, firing bullets, expending supplies, sending tanks to get blown up. That all grew the economy massively.

Investment in infrastructure that adds permanently to wealth and enables business to do more with less, is definitely a superior investment, if done on the same scale as a war.

[Jervill]

For another one, check out 270 to win's house map here: House map.
The ratings are by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, but it can be modified like most maps on 270 to win's site.

[Lord Shonus]

World War II spending sealed the deal for ending the depression, before that, politics hampered most big project spending, like hitting the accelerator so softly that you can't overcome friction. The Hoover Dam etc helped with jobs in the short term, and it gave a renewable resource down the track, but there wasn't enough investment to break the cycle.

Mind you, in World War II, a lot of the spending was deliberate waste - wasting fuel, dropping bombs, firing bullets, expending supplies, sending tanks to get blown up. That all grew the economy massively.

Investment in infrastructure that adds permanently to wealth and enables business to do more with less, is definitely a superior investment, if done on the same scale as a war.

Its a narrow line. The debt from WWII and rebuilding Western Europe afterward is a big part of today's budget problems. Besides taking up a fair amount of the debt itself, a considerable portion of the rest would never have been borrowed if the nation hadn't already carried so much debt. Infrastructure isn't much better for this, as the return on the investment will be in tax revenue, which takes a long time to recoup even at European rates.

[Reelya]

The total inflation-adjusted dollar value of the US debt didn't actually increase between 1945 and 1980, there is definitely more than one factor at work. The percentage of GDP of the total debt was lower in 1980 than before the war.

so I don't think you can draw a direct link between the WWII spending and today's deficits. Other programs added more to that than the WWII spending.

Post-1980 is a whole other ballgame which can definitely not be tracked back to the WWII stimulus. Inflation adjusted, new debt since 1980 makes up 7/8ths of the total debt.

[PTTG??]

Imagine a wealthy person finds, one morning, that his house has been vandalized, a stone thrown through one of the windows. While, yes, it does trigger economic activity for the person to hire a glazer to come fix the window, you only see that with a very simplistic model. For surely, the homeowner is not simply choosing to either fix a window or not, throwing the cash away without spending it on anything. The homeowner must now choose between buying something else (let's say, a pair of shoes). Without the stone, it is possible to have both a perfectly sound household AND a pair of shoes; with the stone, we must choose between a good window OR a new pair of shoes (or some other quantity of goods).

The so-called Broken Window fallacy follows WWII arguments like a vengeful ghost. The fact is, if you DON'T bomb a city, and instead use reconstruction funds for, say, construction funds, you can end up with TWO cities. Or maybe one city that is twice as wealthy, healthy, and clean.

We cannot say that "without WWII, the economy wouldn't have rebounded". After all, the economic conditions of the great depression LEAD to WWII, as they lead to facism and nationalism in various mediterranian, greco-roman countries which will remain nameless in the current recession. Furthermore, I'm not saying "without WWII, the econonmy would have rebounded on its own", because there's even less historical evidence to argue over in that case (there not being any alternate earths to access where WWII didn't happen).

If there is one thing to take from George Orwell's 1984- one thing he did get right right off the bat- it is that war is a useless consumer. I would add that even worse, it has an addictive effect to the economy. Imagine that we were to stop the wars, draw down and fire the troops, and immediately stop manufacturing the majority of war materiel. Such a thing would be a serious blow to the economy.

Truly, wr are damned if we don't, damned if we do, damned if we stay here, just plain damned.

[Reelya]

Actually if you never bombed the city in the first place you can probably end up with 3 cites (costs of the bombers + bombs = 1 city, cost of reconstruction = another 1 city).

Part of the success of the WWII model may have been that you're bombing someone else's cities, on credit. So you don't pay the cost of the damage, and the money spent is actually additional economic activity, that someone in the future pays for.

One problem with the strict application of the "broken windows" story is that it implies that nothing we can EVER do creates additional economic activity, EVER.

[Lord Shonus]

War spending can also hurt you a great deal down the line by aiding competition. A large part of the Japanese economic bubble in the 70s and 80s was that they had to rebuild all their factories from scratch after the war. After this mammoth project was done, Japanese factories were far more modern and efficient than US ones, as US companies were incrementally upgraded facilities, many over a century old.

@Reelya

The source you linked shows a massive increase in debt as a percentage between 1940 and 1945, which does not drop all the way to prewar levels. In other words, a significant portion of the debt was, in fact, caused by WWII.

[Reelya]

Percentage of GDP is the figure that matters. Numerical value does not. The top chart is raw dollars adjusted by inflation, the bottom chart is that figure as a percentage of GDP.

The figure you're looking at is definitely not the percentage. By the mid-60's percentage of debt / GDP was lower than before the war spending.

Historically, the inflation-adjusted debt prior to 1980 makes up only 1/8th of total debt.

[Nadaka]

I've already mentioned my mega-project of interest. Large scale solar power. It would cost under $20 trillion to replace 100% of electrical production. And probably less than twice that to replace rest of the energy industry. And the year over year savings would break even after a few decades.

[Jervill]

My Dream Public Works Project:  Massive investment in true high-speed rail (185 mph+) on a scale the same as the interstate highway system, connecting every major metro center to each other.  Of course, that will never happen, ever, unfortunately.

[Karnewarrior]

Oddly, space colonization doesn't work here as it's relatively small scale despite the size of the budget. You only need so many people to build the rocket, after all, and speanding the money elsewhere would have just as big a trail back to the raw materials.

I like the train network too, although the opposition would claim it would crash the car market (it would, though the train market would soar again.).

I think I heard somewhere that we would have used trains forever save for some crazy market manipulation by car companies knocking it off the rails. Not sure where I heard that or the reliability, but it sems plausible to me.