In this MSNBC article, entitled "Deflation poses new economic threat," there is a pretty good analysis of what deflation means for the economy at large.

I would like to lift out the final paragraph of this article and bold what I think might get lost in over conventional wisdom din:

The recent, huge injection of hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system should help offset deflationary pressures. Tax cuts could help, along with further increases in government spending on rebuilding roads and bridges. As the government pumps money into the economy and financial system that generally boosts inflation and should limit the odds that deflation could take hold.

The other tool to fight deflation mentioned elsewhere is to lower interest rates. Since the Fed has already lowered interest rates close to zero, that is just not an option.

Therefore, government spending is the only empirically proven option.

Now while I don’t necessarily agree that solely rebuilding roads and bridges is a very forward thinking strategy, I do think that "Apollo type" projects in developing a more powerful car battery, developing more efficient solar panels, or developing environmentally friendly wind farms (while finding a way to deal with the bird population) should take place. Installing solar parks and wind farms, among other things, as well as repairing our roads and bridges, which in many cases haven’t been upgraded since the 50s, would put a lot of money in the economy from the bottom up, not the top down. In 1933, President Roosevelt created and implemented the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in 37 (!) days after he came into office. President Obama could create something similar, especially for depressed areas in the Rust Belt affected by the upcoming mass layoffs in the auto industry.

In order to achieve the goal of bringing in a new era, the language that we use should be different, it should not be "spending" but "investment;" the development of the Internet in the early 90s, led to the dawn of the Information Age. The "Green Age" is, in my mind, the next frontier, and President-Elect Obama has talked about investing in said technology.

The Conventional Wisdom, unfortunately, was voiced clearly by Jim Lehrer in the first debate when he asked, and I am paraphrasing, what spending do we need to cut due to the economic downturn? No one questioned the premise of the question in the first place, it is Generally Accepted Wisdom.

So I open the forum for a little discussion, what technologies, such as the ones I named could lead to a new era?

What technologies have the promise to be developed into large public works projects so that the money spent finds its way to the lower and middle class and not private contractors?

Finally, how do we overcome the media’s obsession with treating the government budget like it is a family’s budget?