With country after country announcing ’stimulus’ plans to help supposedly create jobs and jump start the economy, it appears that there is just one leader who is sticking to capitalism. with today being election day in Israel, PM wannabe Benjamin Netanyahu has outlined his economic plan which instead of calling for more spending than the country can afford, he is calling for massive tax cuts and privatization.

With the US plan calling for more than $800 billion in spending in order to create and save jobs, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t a better approach to try and jump start the economy. After all Prez. Obama says the program will help create/save 4 million jobs. Well at $800 billion, we are talking about spending more than $200,000 to create 1 job. That’s insane. It would be cheaper to just write each company a check for $60,000, and force them to hire 1 person.

If Netanyahu wins today’s election and sticks to his campaign promise of lower taxes, it will be interesting to see how the Israeli economy reacts compared to most other countries that have chose higher spending to try and solve their problem.

After all why after a global economic slowdown we have universally bailed on capitalism is beyond. Netanyahu has an interesting point on this same topic reported in Marketwatch: “Netanyahu therefore harshly opposes the emerging global trend of legislating expensive stimulus plans. “The fact that around the world budgets are being breached doesn’t mean we should become captive to this Keynesian concept,” he told the Marker, the Ha’aretz daily’s business-news division. His recipe is to resist new spending so as to immediately introduce an ambitious tax cut. If we send the cash to the people, he says, they’ll do a better job deciding how to spend that newly available income than the bureaucrats would.”

If he wins it will be an interesting next few years to actually compare how different economic philosophies play out during a  crisis.

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