The Economy and John Maynard Keynes

Welcome back John Maynard Keynes. All is forgiven. Poor JMK has been out of favor with economists for quite some time, that is since the seventies. JMK started as a true believer in monetary economics but changed his ideas with the onset of the Great Depression. By the 1970's Monetary theory was back in fashion thanks to Milton Friedman. Today JMK is back in favor although his ideas are little understood.

Economic stimulus or economic recovery package. Call it what you will, it's time to re-read our John Maynard Keynes. Time to pull out the multiplier effect and understand it.
Or to paraphrase a pundit, Keynsianism never went away, every time a government interfered in the economy it was always Keynesian concepts at work.
The free market ideology is merely an extra marital affair whilst the world remained faithful to JMK. And so on and so forth.
In Australia, the PM proposes a $42billion economic stimulus package.
In the U.S. Barack Obama announces an economic recovery package.

The only question in my mind is this. Is government spending on infrastructure more effective than government giving cash backs to voters? As far as I understand Keynes, he advocated government spending in infrastructure. What we are seeing in Australia is in fact a government squandering money without any real impact on the economy. At most, the lowest income families would get $950. Now whatever each family decides to do with this money, I don't see it as giving the economy a boost. For example, this amount is just enough to pay for home insurance for one year. Or a bit more than the cost or registering a family car. It's not as if $950 is going to buy anybody a plasma TV. Which is good because if everyone did that then instead of stimulating the economy the net result would be an adverse effect on our foreign exchange reserves and an increase in foreign debt. That's because most if not all consumer products are imported.
In contrast, government (should be) spending $42billion on infrastructure such as schools, roads, hospitals, public transport and much needed dams to relieve our drought situation which would create a true multiplier effect as John Maynard Keynes expounded.