The Living Room Times

My liberal readers will already agree with what I’m about to quote, and my conservative readers will immediately dismiss it because the link goes to nytimes.com, so I don’t know why I bother — but for what it’s worth:

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the [stimulus] bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. …

The reasons for the stimulus’s middling popularity aren’t a mystery. The unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, and many families are struggling. Saying that things could have been even worse doesn’t exactly inspire. Liberals don’t like the stimulus because they wish it were bigger. Republicans don’t like it because it’s a Democratic program. The Obama administration hurt the bill’s popularity by making too rosy an economic forecast upon taking office. … Even if the conventional wisdom is understandable, however, it has consequences. …

Of course, no one can be certain about what would have happened in an alternate universe without a $787 billion stimulus. But there are two main reasons to think the hard-core skeptics are misguided — above and beyond those complicated, independent economic analyses. The first is the basic narrative that the data offer. … The second argument in the bill’s favor is the history of financial crises

Read the whole thing, which has a lot more detail on those “two main reasons.” I await serious rebuttals, based on actual data and well-sourced information and respected expert opinion, not mere assertion and empty argumentation and ideological claptrap.

Meanwhile, with respect to the point I boldfaced above (“saying that things could have been even worse doesn’t exactly inspire”), I would just add the following, quoting from my own Facebook commentary. I was actually talking about the bailouts, but it applies to the stimulus debate as well:

[N]ow everyone hates [the stimulus], just like everyone hates every other preventative effort that has visible costs and invisible benefits (think “botched” hurricane evacuations for storms that don’t ultimately hit). Again I say, Lord, let us not be blinded by our human inability to process counterfactuals, Amen.