The Right Choice

While Nouriel Roubini comes across as a bit of a kook sometimes, he does make a valid point about investing in infrastructure rather than buying troubled assets as a way to help us get out of our current financial mess.

If the private sector does not spend and/or cannot spend, old-fashioned traditional Keynesian spending by the government is necessary. It is true that we already have large and growing budget deficits; but $300 billion of public works is more effective and productive than spending $700 billion to buy toxic assets. [via Forbes]

As an Austrian School of Ecomomics believer, I feel that the government should just be in business to create policies (i.e. taxes) and incentives that encourage private entities to build new infrastructure using their money instead of the governments.  Why keep spending our way to another debt ridden future?