Barney Frank is Smart
By These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.
A couple weeks back we had a Preserve Raptor Jobs troll here making the argument, apparently without irony, that the F-22 was economically justifiable because its maintenance and refit costs could potentially stretch fifty or sixty years in the future. In other words, the Raptor is the gift that we keep on paying for.