Do people really believe this will help the economy??

You can't create a good economy by government spending because in order for government to get the $50 Billion, they had to take the $50 Billion away from people in the economy that would otherwise spend it. The money isn't free.

If government spending was the solution to providing a happy and good economy, we could just create make work jobs building bridges to nowhere and suddenly everyone would be employed.. but it doesn't work.

Worse yet everyone is aware of how inefficient the government is at just about everything they do. So there will be considerable overhead.

This almost reminds me of the genius soviet socialist economic planners that would have the starving people working away in the factories, grain in the field waiting to be harvested, unnamed tractors rusting away in the field, all while those factory workers are busy building more tractors. Simple employment does not bring about a happy economy, we need to do the right things and it's market signals that tell us what those things are, not bureaucrats.

• Re: Boston Globe: hurdles in digitizing health records by Ignacio Valdes, MD on Saturday January 03, 2009 @ 04:16 AM

  The other sticky issue is the government basically picking the winners and the losers. Especially with such a complex undertaking as health IT. I liken this to the government directly and massively putting itself in control of cell-phone or web-browser markets or research and development. It is unclear that the outcome would be that great and a tremendous amount of money would probably be wasted. Webreach's Mirth has probably done more for interoperability than anyone else and they did it without a dime of government money that I know of. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. -- IV

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