August 31, 2011
Jonathan Cohn, at TNR, shows that the Stimulus worked, no matter how much it is maligned, and that its major problem was that it was not larger.
Of course, the Stimulus worked in another way besides just creating more jobs. It worked because when the economy was in free-fall it was necessary for the government to do something, almost anything really, to show that it was not going to stand by and leave the future of the economy to the impersonal forces of the market. We were in free-fall. We are not now. That, too, is how this much-maligned program worked.
