I'd buy the Economic truism here if we were talking about actual money.
In fact, we're talking about borrowed, i.e. pretend, money.
Fact is, we're broke. Have been for awhile. We don't have the productivity and wealth management to sustain the sort of consumption life-style We the People (and the people we select to "lead" us) have insisted upon.
We've been using shell games for the past 20 years or so to mask the fact that much of the rest of the world makes stuff more cheaply than we do, and that we've prefered to buy the cheaper stuff rather than our own (duh). We've wanted to do this, while maintaining our wages, pensions and entitlements, too.
If we were talking about actual, physical wealth, then, yes, I'd agree that it would be used more efficiently in the private rather than in the public sector.
But if we're talking about money extorted from foreigners in order to preserve their investments with the "global currency" (the dollar), then we're talking about is 40% illusory money that isn't really there. Whether the government borrows it, prints it or takes it from the "rich," it amounts to the same thing: sooner or later, we'll run out of shells to hide things under, and we'll have to confront the truth: we're not as rich as we've pretended we were, and we'll have to live our lives with less.
As far as I can tell, the Pubs and their budget cuts are demanding that we face the music sooner, face our impoverished entitlement programs now, and go ahead and suffer (my preference, since I think the sooner we do this, the sooner we can establish the fundamental base of our economy and start real growth again--of course my Catholic presumption we'll go to Purgatory before we go to Heaven has an emotional piece to play here...). The Dems apparently prefer that we pretend we're still rich, that the Pubs just hate granny and poor people, and that we can keep on keeping on until the repossession guys show up and take the car and the furniture.
I guess we'll see in 2012 where most the We the People stand.
