Hoisted from the Archives: Cranks and Charlatans: Stephen Moore and the Club for Growth
Deficit Spending and the Recovery: Talking Points for KQED Forum Morning Appearance, September 4, 2009, 9 AM PDT, 88.5FM, San Francisco

Alien Lizard People on the Radio: KQED 88.5 Forum Update...

http://www.kqed.org/radio/programs/forum/

"So who else do you have on the show?"

"John Taylor from Stanford and Michael Graybell from ProPublica. No alien lizard people this time!"

KQED misunderstands me: my point last September is that it makes more sense to put someone on who wants to warn us about the threat of the Alien Lizard People from North Polar Jupiter than to put someone on from the Club for Growth. Alien Lizard People are more entertaining than the Club for Growth. And they are equally informative.

It truly is remarkable: the Republican-leaning economists who make a living by selling their analyses of the economy to manufacturing firms that need information about demand and to financial firms that need information about industry profits are overwhelmingly assessing that the Obama short-run deficit-spending program has been and is being and will be effective--they are seeing the same 0.5 within-quarter fiscal multiplier and the same 3% boost to the second-quarter growth rate that everybody else is seeing. It's only (a) the true ideologues and (b) those who have decided to make their living by pleasing Republican politicians who are saying that the stimulus is ineffective...

John Taylor is behaving badly: claiming that Mark Zandi's and Larry Meyer's and Doug Elmendorf's assessments that the stimulus package is working are simply repeats of things they said last January and that they "haven't looked at the numbers"...

Contrast between Taylor 2009 and Taylor 2004 on short-run effects of fiscal policy is quite remarkable...

ProPublica guy thinks his job is looking for "gotcha" stories about stimulus money going for "lion cages at the National Zoo." Not the best focus...

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