Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"This has been a long, long term debate over decades, probably over 70 years. Both would accomplish the same objective of putting more money into the private sector. The debate really surrounds two issues. One, who should call the shots. Those who favor individuals deciding how this additional money would be spent would favor tax cuts. Those who favor government calling the shots would obviously favor something like an infrastructure spending plan where the government is directly spending the money. So that's one debate. The second debate is over the impact, and that is to say, for each dollar of either tax cut or infrastructure spending, what's the total effect on the economy. And in the past, the nod has been given to infrastructure spending. That is to say, there'd be more total impact on the economy from a dollar spent on infrastructure than from a dollar cut in taxes, but there's been some recent research that disputes these results and actually gives the nod to tax cuts. So I think the bottom line here is that this debate will continue, but I do think it's very likely that the new administration will favor the infrastructure spending approach."