The blogger Your Lying Eyes takes on a point in Obama’s press conference that also caught my attention: the warning that if we don’t do what the administration proposes, we might end up like Japan. Says YLE:

I think if that should be our fate — a decade of 1.5 percent real growth — we ought to declare a national holiday. I’m afraid what lies in store is something much worse than that, and Obama’s stimulus can’t possibly prevent it.

For an example of the kind of intractable social problems roiling Japan after the economic devastation of the 1990s, see my January diary here.