The Federal Government's expenditures needs to be a lot lower than it is across the board. It needs a serious dose of efficiency. The borrowing alone impacts all business and individuals simply because it removes money from individuals directly and indirectly which slows the economy, puts pressure on future governments to raise taxes furthering the loss of spending by individuals, and lastly leads to uncertainty in the future.
The truly sad part is they could balance the budget and operate with a surplus by doing two simple things, getting rid of baseline budgeting and keeping spending increases under inflation. Some projections put doing those two items as righting the budget in less than 10 years
Look up the term dead weight losses to get an idea of how bad government spending is for the economy versus private spending.
We have indeed seen it in action since 2008, to horrific results.
$9+ trillion in new public debt added in eight years, to go with ~$11 trillion in additional government spending, boosting federal spending by nearly 1/2, to achieve the slowest average growth in non-recessionary times in US history, and the slowest employment recovery in US history.
More typically you get examples like the governments of Japan and China, which over-spent by the trillions of dollars and misallocated resources on purpose to fake economic prosperity that doesn't really exist so their citizens don't get upset. To say nothing of the favor and bribe based system large governments always operate by - so eloquently demonstrated by the entirely worthless American Recovery and Reinvest Act - in which they choose to allocate resources to their favorite causes (or to build things that aren't even needed) instead of to the most productive outcomes.
China is providing an amazing example of how incompetent command spending always is in an economy. Inevitably when the tide goes out, the fraud begins to reek. In the case of China, they've been busy arresting people to make it look like they're doing something about the vast corruption they've caused through distorting the economy to a truly massive degree. They caused the problems, and then arrest people for their own incompetence. The big difference with the US, is the US doesn't arrest its executives based on the mistakes the Fed made in intentionally creating asset bubbles that inevitably collapsed.
>$9+ trillion in new public debt added in eight years, to go with ~$11 trillion in additional government spending, boosting federal spending by nearly 1/2, to achieve the slowest average growth in non-recessionary times in US history, and the slowest employment recovery in US history.
While I agree with the general outlines of your point, this really doesn't make the case. It's impossible to know what would have happened in the absence of whatever policy you want to discuss. You can say "We spent X and as a result our recession was the longest ever." But you could also say "We spent X, and despite that our recession was the longest ever." It's impossible to prove one way or another.
China has many serious problems, but its situation simply does not prove what you are suggesting here.
China is a once heavily communist country that has been transitioning its economy for awhile now, and it has been quite successful at it. The idea that it is a fake prosperity ignores the changes in quality of life that have happened.
The problems it faces now are not insurmountable. It is easy to list off everything China should do and point out the corruption, but it doesn't really prove anything about fiscal stimulus in the USA.
Dismissing the government stimulus/intervention without considering what would have alternatively happened, a long and deep depression, is disingenuous. That would have been a horrific result, and we would all be worse off.
Balancing the budget is not important. Increasing utility per dollar spent (the dollar is conjured by the govt, it isn't a real resource) can easily be achieving by cutting back on all the productivity wasted by paying people to blow stuff up and maim each other.
The truly sad part is they could balance the budget and operate with a surplus by doing two simple things, getting rid of baseline budgeting and keeping spending increases under inflation. Some projections put doing those two items as righting the budget in less than 10 years
Look up the term dead weight losses to get an idea of how bad government spending is for the economy versus private spending.