Robert Reich, The Budget Deficit, and Government Spending

From Robert Reich's, "Why We Should Stop Obsessing About The Federal Budget Deficit",

"Public investments that spur future job-growth and productivity shouldn’t even be included in measures of government spending to begin with. They’re justifiable as long as the return on those investments – a more educated and productive workforce, and a more efficient infrastructure, both generating more and better goods and services with fewer scarce resources – is higher than the cost of those investments. 

In fact, we’d be nuts not to make these investments under these circumstances. No sane family equates spending on vacations with investing in their kids’ education. Yet that’s what we do in our federal budget."

I'm not sure about "shouldn't be included in measure of government spending," but they certainly go to show that anyone who wants to rank among rational, informed people should not look at government spending as somehow necessarily bad. Government spending can be good, and more often than not is. Private spending decisions can also be either good or bad ... at least outside the fantasy world of laissez-faire dogma.