No, of course not. The people at Elite Productions spend it on whatever they want to.
But wasting $100,000 which was earned by the hard work of taxpayers is very damaging to our economy and society as a whole. The only way to make progress in society is for money to be invested in worthwhile activities, and this clearly isn't in that category.
I suspect you are alluding to Keynesian economics where supposedly spending money in any way helps the economy. Unfortunately that theory fails in practice. Spending and investing wisely helps society, wasting money doesn't.
I’m greener than a 3-dollar bill when it comes to economics. My outlook and inquiries tend to be overly simple. For example, I ask myself, when someone has intellectual property - no tangibles other than sounds, words, etc. - and a population takes enough interest to spend money on it, where does the money come from, and where does it go? The zero-sum outlook would keep the number of dollars static. But we print more dollars. Does not a growing economy require more dollars? How arbitrary is the assignment of value between a dollar and its object?
It is all somewhat complicated to me on the one hand, and yet my questions are merely those of a layman who lives hand to mouth, one day to the next, sometimes wasting money with regrets, sometimes not. I’ve been a solid contributor to the brewers of Hamm’s for a number of years now.
Thanks for the great comments, folks!
I’d like to respond in particular to these last couple of points, because I think in retrospect that I didn’t hammer one point as hard in my column as I’d intended (that’s the problem with doing my writing at 2am I guess!)
In addition to the damage done by overspending and borrowing for needless spending (this $100,000 is really going to cost a few hundred thousand, because it’s borrowed), part of the damage that it does is that it’s essentially campaign fraud.
By giving government money to a vendor normally used by Dem candidates, this vendor can now charge those candidates less than he normally would. That means that government money has essentially been used to support a campaign, a total violation of all Federal Election Campaign acts.
Not that the GOP will ever be courageous enough to bring up the point in a campaign. The first we’ll hear of most Republican party officials about Dem vote fraud, Dem fundraising improprieties, and other Dem violations will be AFTER the election is over.