Vice President Joe Biden, on Meet the Press, a few weeks ago, discussing the stimulus: “No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be . . . Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed.”
Christina Romer, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, to the Financial Times yesterday: “We always knew we were not going to get all that much fiscal impact during the first five to six months. The big impact starts to hit from about now onwards.”
Strange, I don’t remember any mention of “not going to get all that much fiscal impact during the first five to six months” when the Obama administration kept telling us that all of the projects were “shovel ready.”