In our stupid discourse, you can’t ask whether or not the stimulus worked because the Republicans say it didn’t, and that’s that. The “stimulus didn’t work” might as well have been established by the Council of Nicea. You can’t question it. In reality, there are two ways of posing the question. The first is straightforward. Did the stimulus do any good? Are we better off than we would have been without it? Should we reward politicians who voted for it?
The answer to all those questions is ‘yes.’
The second question is whether it ‘worked’ in the sense that it repaired the damage done to the economy by the collapse of the housing bubble and the financial sector. That’s a more subjective question. No bill could reverse the financial damage done to countless individuals or businesses that failed. But perhaps a bill could help bring the unemployment rate down to pre-crisis levels. The stimulus bill ‘worked’ in the sense that it created over 3 million jobs. It didn’t work in the sense that it didn’t create 7 million jobs.
The obvious conclusion is that the stimulus bill was a good bill that should have been bigger. Trying to get a Republican to understand that is like trying to teach calculus to a donkey.
