The stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do: prevent a prolonged recession and return the economy to growth.
> Nobody 8 years ago would have predicted what happened.
If you had taken a poll of Keynesian economists on the likely impact of the policies (a modest fiscal stimulus together with expansionary monetary policy), I'm pretty sure most of them would have predicted exactly what we got: a mild recovery coupled with strong asset growth.
This idiotic notion that stimulus didn't work is a myth promoted by Republicans. If the stimulus didn't work, we'd have suffered through a long recession and would have high unemployment to this day. You don't even have to look far to find evidence of this: European countries forced into austerity have had precisely the kind of anemic economic and labor market growth that Keynesian economics predicted.
That's pretty far from being a simple observational fact. I'd say the stimulus did work pretty much exactly as well as most economists expected.
Evidence:
* Unemployment rate: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
* GDP: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3kv2
* Household income: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3kv6
The stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do: prevent a prolonged recession and return the economy to growth.
> Nobody 8 years ago would have predicted what happened.
If you had taken a poll of Keynesian economists on the likely impact of the policies (a modest fiscal stimulus together with expansionary monetary policy), I'm pretty sure most of them would have predicted exactly what we got: a mild recovery coupled with strong asset growth.
This idiotic notion that stimulus didn't work is a myth promoted by Republicans. If the stimulus didn't work, we'd have suffered through a long recession and would have high unemployment to this day. You don't even have to look far to find evidence of this: European countries forced into austerity have had precisely the kind of anemic economic and labor market growth that Keynesian economics predicted.