David Brooks hasn't been reading his own newspaper...

He writes that it isn't clear the stimulus worked, because the economy hasn't gotten that much better, despite the case that "it is certainly true that the fiscal spigots have been wide open."

Except, you know, it's not. How can this be true given a $780 stimulus!!!! Well, deduct the AMT patch and we're near just $700 billion, and then consider that perhaps $420 billion of that has been spent the past two years, and then that state and local government budget shortfalls were about $400 billion over the same period, and we're left with fiscal spigots open to the tune of $20 billion...

This isn't the first time Brooks has gotten this wrong... When the stimulus was announced, Brooks wanted it to be trimmed on the grounds that state governors with a $400 million dollar deficit would suddenly be faced with $5 billion in stimulus funds... even though elsewhere in the same newspaper on the same day one could read about massive budget shortfalls, layoffs, tax hikes and budget cuts at the state and local level...

In any case, his article just gets worse and worse as it goes along, he writes: "In fact, it’s very hard to get money out the door and impossible to do it quickly. It’s hard to find worthwhile programs to pour money into."

Well, we seem to have been through this before, haven't we? No less an authority that Chair of the Harvard Economics department bashed the stimulus for not being timely, having convinced himself that the recovery from the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression would be swift, and hence, that most of the stimulus would come years after the recession is over. Although i agreed at the time that the stimulus funds should have been spent more quickly (and they could have), at present there does not appear to be any problem with the spending timeline, given that we are still at 9.5% unemployment despite rock bottom federal funds rates. Second thing, when you've got state and local budget shortfalls, giving states and local governments money creates immediate stimulus which will almost certainly be spent by the end of the next calendar year, for what it does is prevent tax increases and budget cuts, both of which are contractionary.

And Brooks is the most intelligent conservative commentator on the planet. Give his article a read though, it's really quite comical. What's also strange is that after this diatribe against stimulus, at the end of the article he writes: "First, extend unemployment insurance; that’s a foolish place to begin budget-balancing. Second, you need to mitigate the pain caused by the state governments that are slashing spending."

OK, but there's a $300 billion stimulus right there...

Then Brooks pulls a 180 again and writes: "Don’t be arrogant. This year, don’t engage in reckless new borrowing..." But, he had just written otherwise! How are we supposed to give aid to states and extend unemployment benefits without borrowing money?

Earlier in the article, Brooks berated liberal economists for "having total faith in their models." But of course, one thing models have over using your gut is that they are logically internally consistent. Instead of using models, Brooks uses his gut, which tells him that 1) These liberal economists are full of shit and therefore we should not do stimulus, 2) we should do stimulus to states and the unemployed, and 3) we shouldn't issue more debt.

But of course, my model says these are mutually contradictory...