Victor - if you are going to say that the first stimulus "failed", can you tell us what your baseline is?

That is to say, in order to judge its success or failure, you have to compare the outcome to an proposition about what would have happened in its absence.

What is yours?

If you're not transparent about your assumptions, then this is just cheap sloganeering.

gbh: No, the onus is on the defenders to prove it worked.

After all, the stimulus is paid for, ultimately, by taxes. Those taxes are extracted with threats of jail. It's also crowding out an equivalent amount of completely legitimate business activity. The American people don't need to justify their rights, they are INALIENABLE.

Even by the ludicrous "anything goes" interpretation of the general welfare clause, *you* have to show that it benefits the general welfare. You have to show why we must sacrifice and why our children must sacrifice for these mad schemes.

And you can't do it. You can't even begin to justify it.

It was wrong when Bush did it, it's wrong now that Obama's doing it, and when you put all of Bush's spending together with all of Obama's, the trillions we've spent at least get us one nugget of pure bipartisan truth: we know for certain that this Keynesian nonsense is pure bunk.

Those studies overwhelmingly rely on modeling and the results are primarily a function of the multiplier assumed. To oversimplify - assume a high enough positive multiplier and the stimulus worked; assume a negative one and it didn't

Sort of like the old joke -- several people are stranded on a desert island and discover a cache of canned food. Much discussion about how to open the cans, until the economist in the group says, "First, assume a can opener."

They made up a fake multiplier to say hey even though things are worse it worked. Study after study proves borrowed government spending for insane projects has a negative multiplier but you can't accept this because liberalism is a religion. Which is why you hate christianity because it compete with your worship of statism and your own self loathing for the individual and individual rights

Not to add to your already substantial embarrassment, but if you're seriously trying to argue that the stimulus worked, then where are the jobs? Why was there zero hiring last month? Why did unemployment numbers just go up? Why did the 'green energy' funding disappear? Why did no serious infrastructure work emerge from all that infrastructure spending?

In short, if it worked, where is the evidence?

Even though it's hilariously obvious that you didn't "read studies", you read Ezra Klein's opinion of the studies, you still have no ground on which to stand. Klein picked the studies and undersampled the ones that claim to show the stimulus did not work. But even with that biased playing field, the ones that say it did "work" are merely being pedantic. They claim, at best, that the stimulus gave some out of work people a job for a brief amount of time. They define 'working' as having an impact, no matter how short or pointless or ultimately detrimental.

But that was, of course, not the objective. The objective was to 'kick-start' the economy. I know you left-wingers have no real-world experience, but trust me: if an engine sputters and dies, it's not 'kick-started'. It's off.

The stimulus did not work. There is no getting around that. And you know it. Which is why you have your other lame fallback argument: that it didn't work because it wasn't big enough. Which is hilarious: what is big enough? Trillions of dollars of money (counting the money spent, interest on debt, and so forth) for nothing. How much then? Gazillions?

But of course you can't tell us. The smartest people in the world (their label) apparently completely muffed the stimulus impact prediction. So how could you know how much more to spend? But of course that's all academic, right, because the real point is to keep giving everyone 'free money' until 2012 rolls around. Right?

If you're not careful, people might start thinking you're talking out of your lower extremities.

Incidentally, anyone else find it mildly ironic that they're asking for more money by telling us they didn't know what they were doing when they got the first lump of cash? Hi, we made up a bunch of numbers to sucker you into that last wad of cash, but this time we're serious. And we only want half as much!

The government. We can't run a profitable business, so trust us to kick-start the economy. Right after we're done altering the sea levels and controlling the very heavens. And ending poverty. And providing efficient, quality schooling. And on and on and on.

It occurs to me that the last rat
to exit the sinking ship
isn't the least intelligent,
it's the most ideological.

Faith-based economics.

Fascinating...

It's easy to see what is added, hard to see what is lost.
External Link 

Just took a quick look at the Wilson study. The mantra using “jobs saved or created” is getting old since all that need be claimed is that we guess that x jobs would be lost without this spending to declare it a success. Academically dishonest would be my kindest comment.

As an aside -- we are in the midst of a financial crisis and not a classic Keynesian demand slump. We need to work off the debt overhang which is especially acute on consumer balances (mortgages upside down to asset values, credit cards, and student loans). Broad based tax cuts will only be used by consumers to pay down debt, which is not necessarilly bad but will not create jobs. Large corporations are already sitting on a mountain of cash and will only increase their cash holdings with broad based business tax cuts such as the payroll tax.

The best that government can do in the short run is to reduce regulatory burden on start up businesses, reduce payroll taxes on net job creations (net creations in the following 18 months for a 7 year forgiveness period), ease intellectual property transfers from research based university programs to private start ups, and most important -- quit with the short term tax code patches.