Our economy is stalled. Tax revenues are down and unemployment/welfare costs are up. Many of our ongoing expenses are beyond our control. We can’t, for example, stop payment on interest debt or fail to pay government employees and military members.

If we borrow a bit more money (at today’s almost zero interest rate) and use it to stimulate the economy we can breathe some life back into the system.

It’s a perfect time to improve our infrastructure. Our roads and bridges are in poor shape. Our electric grid is wasting energy. Our buildings require too much heat to keep comfortable. The list goes on.

We dropped a train into the water a couple weeks ago when a bridge failed.

Bad roads cost us in gas mileage and vehicle wear and tear. That drives up our cost of production and lowers our ability to compete and grow our GDP.

Borrow some money. Put Americans to work fixing the country. Those people going to work come off the unemployment and welfare roles, expenses drop. Those newly employed people pay taxes, revenues increase.

It’s just good business.

We spend a lot of taxpayer dollars and health insurance premium money to pay for the health damaged caused by burning coal. If you include all the external costs of coal then it’s obvious that coal is our most expensive energy source.

By installing more renewable energy and improving efficiency we can further reduce the amount of coal we burn and lower the price we pay for electricity.

Cheaper electricity means that it becomes easier to compete on the global market. The more competitive we become, the higher our GDP grows.

This article’s opinion unsettles me because its arguments are based primarily on the Great Depression and WWII. I think a more holistic analysis would be more convincing.

At the present time, I am inclined to think that putting the nation in more debt now would mean a bigger crash later. I think the crash was avoided after the WWII debt because the USA grew tremendously in GDP due to the debt. In other words, small companies can benefit from going into debt if they use the debt to grow their business—and countries are not much different. In the current global economic climate, I doubt the USA’s GDP could be dramatically improved by going into more debt. Therefore I think more debt now will mean a bigger crash later.