there are somewhere around 15k jobs coming into MD due to BRAC, which means about 60k jobs overall, considering all the extra jobs created by bringing in 15k new workers to an area. where do we put them? baltimore city should be lining up to demolished acres of condemned buildings to build parks and schools and encourage people to move into the city. combining this new area with the surrounding poorer areas will hopefully create some balance economically and socially and improve the lives of the poor in the city, as well as generate more income for the city, which encourages more people to move there, ad finitum.

now is also the time to see more rails, bike paths and car-free zones put into place. no more bulding roads. people need to learn to live closer and build communities.

Would the government then have to use eminent domain to confiscate, I mean
purchase, the homes next to the ones in foreclosure in order to build your parks
and schools?

And where are you going to get all the kids to attend the new schools? Tear down
the old ones? And build what in their place? Oh yes, parks. And what of the
old neighborhoods of the old schools? How are you going to convince families
with young children to patronize the nice new parks in the ghettos?

Also wondering where the government is going to get all this money. Parks and
school are outrageously expensive and with prices of commodities blessedly
falling every day, I wonder if your building adventures will really employ as many
people as you might predict.

Why don’t we just let home PRICES drop back to their 1999 level, which is where
they were before the housing bubble, and then let smart investors purchase them.

Mark, can we please put a time out on all of this Santa Claus Economics? All I’m asking for Christmas is that anytime one of you “experts” mentions stimulus or bailouts, you talk about where the money will come from. Before you talk about all the wonderful things you plan on doing with OPM (other people’s money), you mention all the damage you will inflict on the rest of us who get to foot the bill. There is no free lunch and the government has no resources of its own, just the ability to transfer wealth from the productive and responsible to the wasteful and reckless (e.g. government bureaucracies).

Is there a billionaire out there with the balls to defend the free market? I didn’t think so.

- Kevin Duffy

‘There are so many fallacies in the above posts that I could not comment on them all in this space. More Government spending and public works is the absolute worse thing that the Government could do it our current situation. I am appalled that such thinking is widely accepted and supported. It stems from the myth that the notorious FDR “ended the depression with his New Deal”. FDR (and Hoover) and his well intentioned but tragic programs prolonged the depression and are what truly made it “Great”.

‘Bulldozing homes is another ill conceived idea that is eerily similar the FDR’s program to have farmers plow under crops to help support prices. Home prices need fall consumer to save money for future capital outlays. Here is an excellent article on the beauty of, falling prices are what enable consumers and an economy to pull itself out of tough economic times. Price reduction might be temporarily painful but it is needed to clear malinvestment and allow falling prices, http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/force-is-with-us.html.

‘If you are interested learning about sound economic theory I suggest reading Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in on Lesson and to understand the depression read Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression.‘

Hear hear, Jack!

Mark, one of the best reasons to give the Austrian schoolers (a.k.a., Misesians) a serious look is that they’ve always been smeared and snubbed by government, press, and academia (a repetition?) — a direct result of their being both correct and anti-state (definite repetition!). Be well.

That would just create an inflationary cycle. Prices would rise because the retailers would know that things are being purchased with “free money.” Don’t be dumb.

Instead of sticking it to the taxpayers, why don’t you get together with some of your billionaire buddies and buy up those places yourselves and fund the construction of private schools. you can afford it, we can’t.

Keynes is dead Mark! His theories should have died with him. They don’t work. L

John Petrucci

It is astounding to see hundreds of millions of dollars spent on our US elections & surronding festivities when so many Americans are homeless & hungry. We definitely need to get our priorities together.