Would making Puerto Rico a state likely help or hurt the US economy?

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Do you know what 'economy' means? Economy and politics are intimately associated, but they are not the same. It is always a mistake to confuse one with the other.

Greek 'oikonomia' means a household. The English word means management, as in the class "Home Economics". Management always boils down to pinching pennies, so the word comes to mean frugality.

Did you buy something today? Let's suppose you bought a pencil. Which one? Did you look for a certain brand, or a color, or just grab one from the display nearest the checkout? Whatever you decided, you cast a vote for that exact detail and rewarded the seller with your money. The total of all buying decisions in an area, recorded in the local currency for convenience, is the economy of that area.

There is no thing called "the economy", but still the economy is a very important statistic. Political actions can affect buying decisions, but concern about politics affecting "the economy" misses the point. The USA recently demonstrated point-missing in a grand way. Congress decided to "stimulate the economy" by giving people money to crush their old cars and buy new ones. After a while people began to notice that most of that money was being spent on imported cars, and prices of used car parts were skyrocketing. It never occurred to congress that not all cars are made in thins country, or that used cars are the only source of used car parts. That is what happens when people confuse political grandstanding with "stimulating the economy".

The "cash for clunkers" program was just another example of a teaching point in economics classes, called "broken window fallacy". It is stated "If a window is broken, is the economy enriched by the cost of its replacement?" You can find a long discussion of that question at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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