On 12/9/2012 6:17 PM, Steve Kates wrote:
> And if you look around in every direction today and take in the mess that the stimulus has made of one country after another


Repeated assertion does not make this true.
On the available evidence, it is false.

The CBO estimates say "the stimulus" (ARRA) was an important
brake on the depth of the recession.  As far as I know, there
is no work showing that fiscal responses to the stimulus are
negatively correlated with economic performance. Indeed in
the OECD there is evidence of a positive correlation between
growth performance and stimulus size.

Naturally there is an endogeneity problem in assessing this:
economic circumstances influence the stimulus size. See e.g.
http://www.oecd.org/social/labourmarketshumancapitalandinequality/48197530.pdf

Alan Isaac