>You said in your previous message that government programs based on printing more money and giving this new printed cash to financial institutions and/or investing it in social welfare programs is very beneficial for the country.
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>Did I? I thought I was rebutting the suggestion that government "borrowing" (printing money) necessarily creates a burden for our kids. I tried to point out that:
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>- By spending $200M the US Government now controls at least $1.5 trillion of AIG assets.
>- Unemployment is rising and society does not have a role for almost 1 in 10. We all know the saying about idle hands.
>- Infrastructure spending can be a very good investment even if there is a 50-year loan to be paid by future generations.
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>If you want to discuss "beneficial" could you please consider the meaning of the phrase "lesser of two evils." Lets not pretend that government woke up one morning and decided to do all these things because they thought it sounded cool. Government was presented with a crisis from which everybody else except Government had fled- which is amazing. As Greenspan said in his apology, he had expected that the market was capable of looking out at least for its own interests, but it would appear that this expectation was wrong. Lets also consider that people who have made studying the Depression their life's work were saying last year that the US economy was days away from collapse. If you consider government action in this real-life context rather than in isolation, perhaps you too will be disappointed that government was put in this position in the first place.
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>Apart from that, there are lots of interesting ways to describe the situation in which Obama finds himself. "Between a rock and a hard place" and "damned if you do, damned if you don't" both spring to mind.

I kindly advise you to check how much value could be assigned to AIG assets. To be precise these assets are currently valued just a shade over zero and they quickly approach to this level. 1.5T in assets is a number from fantasy world, but I would be still interested to know what is your source. By spending $200B (billions, not millions) government will hold a bag filled not even by assets, but by liabilities, i.e. it will be responsible for all insurance polcies underwritten by AIG; the same way as government took resposibility for all bad mortgages bought by Fannie/Freddy and so on. It is not a rocket science, imo, to recognize it as a " burden for our kids", because government does not create wealth, it takes wealth from people to pay liabilities.
In regard to 'lesser of two evils' idea, ( btw. it concedes that it is not beneficial, but forcible, i.e. no other choice was presented) I have a question to you. Do you consider any government spending as mandatory for survival or you would agree that some spending could be wasteful and/or harmful?
Could you, please, preserve this message, when you will type the reply?