You are only a mouse click away from checking Recovery.com to see if Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill was a “trillion-dollar stimulus” as the Republicans keep calling it, saying it didn’t work, which is nonsense, even though some Republican governors tried to stymie the stimulus idea by not accepting any funds for their state.

Only about $412 billion has been awarded on the spending side and only two-thirds of that actually has been paid out.

Republicans criticize the bill for the wrong reasons. It did do what it was supposed to but not enough went to mortgage relief or infrastructure, for example.

John Maynard Keynes, if he were here today, would look at the size of the problem we were in during 2009 and would choke. He would say the amount the government spent and how it was spread so thin was obviously weighted toward proving his theory wrong.

He would say the grossly unfair, poorly conducted experiment would appear to do just that and haunt him forever, even though the trajectory of the economy obviously improved, even with a little spending.

Imagine physicists trying to prove; e = mc2 by saying that the energy of something equals its mass times the speed of tricycles squared, instead of the speed of light.

I think if you showed the simple bar graphs showing job and Gross Domestic Product loss and growth, which can be found easily on many government websites, to a typical fifth-grader they would easily see the trend of our economy before and after the stimulus and say, while pointing to the pivot point, “Something good happened right here, but it wasn’t enough. Why didn’t somebody do more?”

Now the GOP doesn’t like the tax credits in the new jobs bill. What? They always want less regulation and lower taxes no matter what the economy is doing. As regards the “less regulation” argument, there were actually more government regulations in recent boom times than there are now.

We are in a giant, drawn-out emergency with no ambulance in sight, while we ride tricycles on thin Keynesian ice.

Mark Rollins

Davis

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