"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...

There were four big REAL (not inflation driven numbers) spurts in the
US economy in the last 105 years: 1922, 1962, 1982, and 2003. Can you
see a pattern in those dates?


Tax cuts probably.

Exactly.

Find a graph of real economic growth and the trends are unmistakable. (I
have one in a book but not a web-based one...sorry).


What I probably should have written is that historically military spending
does not damage the economy as much as other government spending. I read a
paper years ago showing some metrics that basically proved out that since
military spending, especially on the hardware side, creates so many high
paying jobs and develops so many offshoots into the country's civilian
economy that it offsets most of the negatives normally associated with
government spending. That is an incredible simplification of what was
about a 100 page paper but you get the idea.

Military spending is still a drain on an economy. It uses resources that
would be allocated elsewhere (see Bastiat's "Fallacy of the Broken Window"
essay at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy).

It is, however, one of the facts of reality that free humans must endure.