Boosting the Economy

Poverty and the Jewish People Much as I agree with the idea of giving to charity being a mitzva that helps the poor, in my heart I know that it is not the long-term solution to eliminating the existance and cause of poverty. Of course the place to look into this is the Tanach and in Leviticus chapter 25 is the idea of the means to livelyhood namely the land being uniformly distributed to all of the new families that were due to settle in the Land of Cana'an. Thus the present situation why there are so many poor and why the gap between them and the rich is growing is due to our present unjust means of treating the use and availability of the land. Land values vary greatly so it is not sites but work-opportunities to use them that must be fairly shared. By taxing the land value instead of the produce from the land (including that of commerse earned in the center of town where the land is very expensive) and not taxing what is earned by the swet of our noses (literal translation) can we reduce poverty to nothing, Reply

Bosh i think the horses are taking us to the stable.
the driver is drunk and there is no-one to guide them.
the passengers are wearing blinders instead of the horses.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." (animal farm) Reply

You do have a good point, BUT Hallo, my name is Mahmud and I'm studying Economy @ U of Virginia. I grew up in Uganda and M now learning in the US. I do not know Jewish pepole that much but my Prof. is Jewish. So i happen to come to this website.

I want to tell you Rabbi (this is how I should call you?) that you have a good point. In Uganda we grew up very poor and now I'm leaving here and can afford buying myself diet coke and cigar. So your point is very valid.
Thank you! Reply

Deficit spending In the days when our ancestors first received Torah, we had shekels and we had the barter system, and overall we had a much objective view of money: It represented the value of exchanged merchandise much more closely then it did now. Since then money has taken on subjective values; and starting with the giving of Torah, one of these was the mitzvah of tzedekah. Another, which man gave to money on his own apart from G-d, was to artificially stimulate the economy:

Sort of like one Pharaoh dreaming of seven fat cows, while another Pharaoh watches his magicians fail before Moshe and Aharon.

The problem, then and now, isn't tzedekah to people who may need it. That remains a mitzvah; but there are consequences to these stimulus plans for our economy; and by studying the errors of the Pharaohs as described in Torah we may yet still derive guidance in a divine sense. Reply

a good thing? America needs a stimulus package like an Alcoholic needs another shot!

We need to curb OUR spending and Credit Card usage! Reply

this one isn't true While you think that giving money to the public is a good thing to do, you should be aware that it only make the poor people poorer, and the rich people richer. What you want to do is to make people want to work, not to sit at home and do nothing. Reply

Won't work Your plan won't work.

1) All the Fortune 500 companies are already owned by Bill Gate, who has signed a Collective Defense treaty with Australia (see #2 below).

2) Australia, in anticipation of just such a development, has over the last 26 year been clandestinely developing a strong nuclear deterrent. It currently has 5,628 ITC missiles armed with nuclear warheads and a state-of-art early warning system. Reply