CT Blue

Always in the middle it seems. From this morning’s Times:

Now that unemployment has topped 10 percent, some liberal-leaning economists see confirmation of their warnings that the $787 billion stimulus packagePresident Obama signed into law last February was way too small. The economy needs a second big infusion, they say.

No, some conservative-leaning economists counter, we were right: The package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation’s debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing.

These long-running arguments have flared now that the White House and Congressional leaders are talking about a new “jobs bill.” But with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working. (Emphasis added)

Yes, the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Those liberal economists, blinded by their passion, could not possibly have been completely right.

And yet… The balance of the article appears to consist of one “dispassionate” person after another saying that the stimulus has worked in exactly the sense the liberals predicted-it has staved off disaster, but it is not enough to lift us out of this mess, particularly the employment mess.

But there are criticisms, mainly that the Obama team relied last winter on overly optimistic economic assumptions and oversold the job-creating benefits of the stimulus package.

Optimistic assumptions in turn contributed to producing a package that if anything is too small, analysts say. “The economy was weaker than we thought at the time, so maybe in retrospect we could have used a little bit more and little bit more front-loaded,” said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, another financial analysis group, in St. Louis.

It is an odd thing. The truth really does not often lie in the exact mid-point between two extremes. Ask Galileo and the Catholic Church. He was right, they were wrong. A compromise between them would have been just as wrong.

But the stimulus is not really a good example of a conservative/liberal divide with the liberals being right, because the opening premise of the Times’ article is highly misleading. At the time the stimulus was proposed, there was wide agreement across the ideological spectrum (of economists, that is) that a stimulus was needed. The Republicans were reduced to advertising for economists that would support their do-nothing position. They got some, but, as Brad Delong pointed out, “no current or former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers–Democrat or Republican, living or dead, sane or insane–has signed up for the Republican House caucus’s list of economists opposed to the stimulus package.” Since no economists are quoted in the Times article as claiming the stimulus was not needed, it is impossible to say who the “some conservative-leaning” economists are that are referenced in the second paragraph of the article. In fact, some of the conservatives quoted in the article, all of whom agreed that a stimulus was needed, criticize exactly those portions of the plan (tax breaks, for instance) that were opposed by liberals at the time as relatively ineffective in comparison to the “direct federal spending” that even conservative Martin Feldstein is quoted in the article as favoring.

This may be a case in which a divide was assumed that never existed. Of course it’s always possible to find a person with credentials who will take a position that his or her peers find absurd. There is probably a biology professor out there somewhere that doesn’t accept the truth of evolutionary theory. But that doesn’t mean that there is a dispute among biologists, anymore than the existence of a few ideologues with degrees means there was any real dispute among economists about the stimulus.

All that being said, the liberals, including the Times’ own Paul Krugman, were particularly prescient regarding the stimulus. They opposed the tax break portions of the plan, they called for even more spending, and they warned against removing the direct aid to the states, something thrown in as a sop to gain a veneer of bi-partisanship, which, as Krugman said it would, turned the governors of our states into 50 Herbert Hoovers. The article proves them right, sub silentio. So why does the article imply that the truth was situated in the mythical middle?