The rationale for the $787 billion stimulus legislation enacted in February 2009 is that government spending is necessary for juicing economic activity that would otherwise lie fallow. The idea comes from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the 1936 tome by Keynes that put macroeconomics on the map and launched a debate about the role of the state in managing the business cycle.
Economics being economics, definitive answers are forever lacking. We have only one run of history to analyze and so it’s never clear what might have transpired if we tried x vs. y. Such is life in the dismal science, leaving mere mortals to argue over the scraps of evidence dispensed in the numbers. With that in mind, we offer the following statistical crumbs, fully aware that there are a billion or so other perspectives one might conjure from the sea of data.

Continue reading →

Enron-esque bookkeeping in the healthcare reform legislation? Say it ain’t so. Too late. James Pethokoukis of Reuters just did.