When the government spends a million dollars building a bridge, it creates a bunch of jobs because people need to design the bridge, extract the raw materials for the bridge, and build the bridge.

When the government spends a million dollars building a bomb, it also creates a bunch of jobs for the same reason.

The thing is, a bridge gets you a useful public resource that makes lost of people's lives better and encourages economic growth by making trade easier. A bomb blows up, kills some people, and disappears.

Absolutely, no question. It's the same argument that econonmists make against acceptance of a so-called "service based economy" -- if I pay you $200,000 to build me a house, you've got $200,000 and I've got a house worth $200,000.

If I pay you $100 to clean my house, you've got $100, and all I've got is a clean house. Nice, but there's no market value. There's no multiplier effect.

But there is SOME utility to the gov't injecting capital in the form of military spending. As I mentioned in the comment below yours, the most extreme example of that is WWII, which finally and permanently ended the Great Depression, in a way that the WPA/etc building bridges just did not.

Sounds like something straight out of Orwell's 1984? The economy is based on ridiculous spending my the military, which enables companies to write paychecks to facilitate consumer spending at home. So basically, our way of life depends on finding excuses to go off and kill people, which in turn justifies our military-industrial complex.

No, of course not, and that's the most extreme possible way to take my comments.

But remember that what did more than anything to cure this county of the great depression was the massive Keynesian capital injection that we called WWII.