Matt Yglesias thinks that business investment is not currently depressed:

My intuition is that you would cut these taxes if you thought the problem was depressed business investment. But business investment isn’t depressed:
[Here he provides a chart showing that private nonresidential fixed investment has increased from the first quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2011.]
So what are we talking about here? I know that many conservatives believe that lower capital gains and corporate income taxes will increase savings and investment over the long run and thus boost economic growth over the long run. Whether or not this is true is an interesting and important issue to debate, and I don’t expect campaign reporters to sort it out. But it would be nice if campaign reporters could obtain some clarity on what it is the candidates are even saying. Clearly with unemployment at 9.1 percent everyone is going to peg their ideas to that fact. Yet there’s still a clear distinction between proposals that you just think are generally good ideas for the long-term and ideas that you think specifically address current economic problems. If Romney thinks business investment is currently depressed, and this is the source of high unemployment, then he’s simply mistaken.

Jed Graham kindly sent me a chart from the Bureau of Economic Analysis that tracks private nonresidential fixed investment from the first quarter of 2006 ($1,426.6B) to the second quarter of 2011 ($1,411.7B). The local peak was in the fourth quarter of 2007 ($1,592.3B).

I’d suggest that flat private nonresidential fixed investment for five years, and at levels below those we reached four years ago, is bad news. From mid-2000 ($1,314.4B) to mid-2010 ($1,371.9B), the level was also fairly flat.

Romney does think that business investment is currently depressed, and I think he has a pretty solid case.

Graham has done an excellent job of covering this issue, and he’s a firm supporter of increasing public infrastructure spending to help boost complementary private investment. This is a position embraced by many progressives and at least some conservatives, myself included. I’d be very pleased if more progressives also acknowledged that depressed business investment is a problem, and that there’s a decent case for doing something about it.