Your opinion makes me neither stupid nor a liar. But in good keeping I also regard much the same of you. Here is an article from the New Yorker and written by an individual far smarter and well informed than either of us. Perhaps you care to argue with some of the points that he is sharing with us?
The Financial Page
Second Helpings
by James Surowiecki
When President Obama unveiled an array of new tax-cut and spending proposals last week, one word was noticeably missing from his speeches: “stimulus.” Republicans, meanwhile, energetically set about decrying the plan as “more of the same failed ‘stimulus’ ” and as simply a “second stimulus”—as if the word itself were a damning indictment. The idea of using countercyclical fiscal policy to help get a weak economy moving is hardly radical. But in Washington stimulus has become the policy that dare not speak its name.
This wouldn’t be surprising if we were talking about a failed program. But, by any reasonable measure,
the $800-billion stimulus package that Congress passed in the winter of 2009 was a clear, if limited, success. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it reduced unemployment by somewhere between 0.8 and 1.7 per cent in recent months. Economists at various Wall Street houses suggest that it
boosted G.D.P. by more than two per cent. And a recent study by Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, economists from, respectively, Moody’s and Princeton, argues that,
in the absence of the stimulus, unemployment would have risen above eleven per cent and that G.D.P. would have been almost half a trillion dollars lower. The weight of the evidence suggests that fiscal policy softened the impact of the recession, boosting demand, creating jobs, and helping the economy start growing again. What’s more,
it did so without any of the negative effects that deficit spending can entail: interest rates remain at remarkably low levels, and government borrowing didn’t crowd out private investment........................................ .................................................. .