Economies of scale

The tradeshow industry is perhaps more dependent on the state of the economy than any other industry. This is because without strong demand for their products, exhibitors can’t justify the expense of exhibiting at a tradeshow.


In order for the economy to expand, companies and individuals must have money to spend. One popular idea suggests, in order to get more money in the pockets of individuals, taxes should be lowered.

This theory implies that if people send less to the federal government, they will have more to spend on goods and services. This spending growth will spur companies to expand and hire more workers and these newly hired workers will lead to further increases in economic growth.

Lower taxes seem to be an obsession with certain segments of the population, despite the fact that recent history doesn’t always support the notion that economic growth from tax cuts is inevitable.

For example, when George W. Bush came into office, his predecessor left him with a budget surplus and a booming economy. He promptly cut taxes but the economy tanked, unemployment soared, and he left office with the worst economy conditions since the Great Depression. Obviously the tax cut didn’t have the desired effect.

Nobody likes to pay taxes, I know I don’t. I don’t like paying any of my bills, but I know the consequences if I don’t; however, taxes are different.

In order to appeal to voters, politicians can put off the true costs of running government until later. In essence, put it on the credit card and hope this debt will just go away. The problem is you have to eventually pay everything you put off until later, and the interest as well.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about lowering the costs of running the government, which I think is a great idea. But Social Security and Medicare are the two biggest items; roughly 40 percent of the total budget.

It’s expensive, but necessary; the health of senior citizens is something which any civilized country should have at the top of its list of priorities.

Furthermore, Social Security benefits are the sole source of income for many seniors, and they would be absolutely destitute without this program, which was denounced as “socialist” when it was proposed.

The next biggest line item in the federal budget is the military. We have, by far, the largest military in the world; no one even comes close. In fact, we spend more on our military than the next seventeen countries combined; all of which are our allies. So who are we preparing for?

After the fall of the of the Soviet Union there was talk about a “peace dividend,” savings which would result from not engaging in an escalating and financial ruinous arms race. Nevertheless, defense contractors are still in business and defense expenditures haven’t gone down.

Right now, according to a report from the Congressional Budget office, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us over $1.14 trillion. I know I’ve used this example before, but if you spent a thousand dollars a day, every single day, since the birth of Christ, you wouldn’t have spent a billion dollars.

We’ve spent over a thousand times that amount on these two wars. This is just the cost of the two wars, not the cost of maintaining the largest army in the world. Perhaps people clamoring for smaller government should look at what we really spend our money on.

Just think what that money could have done to improve the lives of the U.S. taxpayer, all U.S. citizens could receive the finest health care in the world. Or perhaps we could go on a building program to update the crumbling infrastructure of our nation.

This would put people to work and create a lasting, useful asset for our citizens. There are many productive uses for our money, wars do nothing but kill people and destroy property.

I’m all for a strong defense, but we need an efficient expenditure of tax dollars, not the greatest expenditure of tax dollars. Countries with booming economies are spending far less than we are and yet they seem to feel safe.

We have to ask ourselves if our military expenditure truly makes us safer, or whether we spend money resulting from the effective lobbying of defense contractors.