lets imagine the ultimate worst example of pork:
the government says we should employ a bunch of americans to put together a big complicated slab of metal. then the government says we should build a boat to send this slab of metal across the ocean. then the government says we should pay some americans to sit in this big “tank” and get blown up by some guys for whatever non-profit reason.
thats some bad pork.
but it employs americans. those americans spend that money on goods and businesses around them that gain that money.
those businesses grow because the obamunist (‘communist’ right?) american government chose to give them a bunch of money in the form of wages.
maybe a more attractive example of pork is building roads or analyzing the environmental effect of the gaseous emissions of unbelievably large pig farms.
pork puts money in consumers pockets. those consumers do NOT save that money, because they are almost in debt if not entirely.
tax cuts for the wealthy result in those wealthy people saving. those wealthy hope that when they save money, it will end up being ok once this whole turmoil ends.
the banks where those wealthy people save their money are thinking the same thing.
the banks that receive payments on all the credit cards and normal, necessary payments from the people who are in need… they will not save that money and invest it only on an extremely conservative scale. those banks will, instead, use it to pay off the debts that already exist as a result of those banks trusting the lower income people back in boom times. they failed on those debts recently, and, like during the great depression, those debts from the banks have caused a general lack of faith in all of the people who invest. when the confidence of those investing people is lost, that is pretty much the main force behind all downward slopes in any economic graph of the 20th century (correct me if im wrong).
what im saying is that the rich will spend their money on saving, and anyone below the ‘american rich’ classification will mostly be paying off their debt. they will be spending it all on consumption, and rich ceo’s with tax cuts will not. my dad will not.
republican tax cuts are beyond misguided, they are dishonest (because the republicans who represent businesses who can benefit from tax cuts must surely know more about economics than some punk with my mere bachelors in economics, right? i hope so). democrat pork barrels may sound stupid and wrong, but i hope i dont need to tell you, that the aggregate demand they hope to stimulate is what we need now.
i would need a few more paragraphs to describe why exactly we need aggregate demand to be stimulated (see: great depression?), but i think pork, and not tax cuts, is the one of two possible ways that we need to select.