re: #85 garhighway

In a related development, the Nobel Prizes for Economics were announced, and among them was Larry Diamond, who is a MIT professor and mentor to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The President has apparently nominated Diamond to the Fed as well, but the nomination is being held up because of the midterm elections and because the GOP claims that Diamond doesn’t have enough experience dealing with the economy.

As for Krugman, the total expenditures of the US government in the past couple of years belies the claims that the budget didn’t get exploded by Obama and Democrats. The problem is that most of the money went to sustain existing programs - transfer payments that the states found unsustainable and continued spending even as their revenues dried up. The federal government attempted to spend even more money to create jobs, and didn’t get it done. It goes back to Krugman’s longstanding argument that the stimulus wasn’t big enough to kick start the economy.

Of course, that too ignores the fact that the NBER found that the recession ended before the ARRA of 2009 even kicked in.