Exposing the Chicago School

Both Paul Krugman (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/) and Brad DeLong (http://delong.typepad.com/) have done much to point out how mystifyingly stupid many conservative economists, particularly macroeconomists, are. Another point they do not seem to grasp is that, because of state and local budget cuts, the Obama stimulus package, which is really over the next three or four years (with parts of it taking even longer), is much, much smaller than it looks like. I.e., state governments alone have more than $350 billion in revenue shortfalls over the next few years, despite substantial cuts already... So, an argument against the stimulus is really an argument that the government should cut spending in the face of a recession... This fact just makes their arguments an order of magnitude crazier...