Jonathan Chait writes:

But would a $400 billion stimulus consisting of 50% tax cuts really be different than an $800 billion stimulus consisting of 40% tax cuts? The stimulus, remember, is a centrist policy, reflecting an economic consensus, and drawing sharp liberal criticism for its insufficient size.

And the link to “economic consensus” takes you to a news article in the New York Times by Jackie Calmes and Michael Cooper. The article begins by noting that some economists believe that the stimulus package was too small.

No, some conservative-leaning economists counter, we were right: The package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation’s debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing.
These long-running arguments have flared now that the White House and Congressional leaders are talking about a new “jobs bill.” But with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.
The legislation, a variety of economists say, is helping an economy in free fall a year ago to grow again and shed fewer jobs than it otherwise would.

What I find puzzling is this: isn’t it obvious that one can believe the first proposition — that “the package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation’s debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing” — and also the second — that it is “helping an economy in free fall a year ago to grow again and shed fewer jobs than it otherwise would”?

Spending vast sums of money will tend to perk up the economy. Questions remain, however: was this a more effective approach than a large Investment Tax Credit or payroll tax relief or some combination of both? Was this more effective than a more front-loaded spending package? Desmond Lachman at AEI has argued for a much more aggressive, front-loaded stimulus, yet this doesn’t cut across the conventional divide. My bias was towards a stimulus modeled very loosely on the German kurzarbeit and an ITC.

Martin Feldstein adds:

While some conservatives remain as skeptical as ever that big increases in government spending give the economy a jolt that is worth the cost, Martin Feldstein, a conservative Harvard economist who served in the Reagan administration, said the problem with the package was that some of its tax cuts and spending programs were of a variety that did little to spur the economy.

The first clause gets at one relevant question, albeit in a roundabout way, i.e., whether the stimulus delivered sufficient bang-for-buck. The latter is a matter of the design of the stimulus.

So again: the consensus that some form of stimulus was called for is a trivial observation. Most conservatives favored some form of stimulus. Jeffrey Sachs, who strongly opposed the federal stimulus package, favored some form of stimulus, and the list goes on. There doesn’t appear to any consensus regarding the appropriate composition of the stimulus. So does this sentence sound right?

The stimulus, remember, is a centrist policy, reflecting an economic consensus, and drawing sharp liberal criticism for its insufficient size.

I have to assume that “the stimulus” refers to the package passed by Congress. Is it meaningful to say that the package passed by Congress reflects an economic consensus? I’m not sure that’s true.

I’ll end with a quote from Sachs:

President Barack Obama’s economic team is now calling for an unprecedented stimulus of large budget deficits and zero interest rates to counteract the recession. These policies may work in the short term but they threaten to produce still greater crises within a few years. Our recovery will be faster if short-term policies are put within a medium-term framework in which the budget credibly comes back to balance and interest rates come back to moderate sustainable levels.

Sachs is strongly in favor of sharp tax increases and a variety of other policies that conservatives abhor, but he is certainly a credible voice who speaks for many.

Chait also writes:

Obama’s health care plan is the outline of a notion that had significant GOP support before the party successfully whipped its members into withdrawing cooperation. The result is still Romneycare plus cost controls.

It is certainly true that some members, like Grassley and Graham, were sympathetic to something like an individual mandate. Others, like Corker, favored something like universal catastrophic coverage. But as for whether there were half a dozen votes for something like the Senate health bill among Republicans in a less hyperpartisan world, I’m not sure. One obvious issue is that Republicans in the House tend to represent older, whiter constituencies that are very wary of Medicare cuts, Republican rhetoric notwithstanding.