Rewriting the History of the Stimulus

Ezra Klein recounted the record of President Obama's stimulus with the help of two of his top economic advisers at the time, Larry Summers and Christine Romer. Romer commented that she failed to recognize that they would only have one shot at stimulus, therefore they had to get as much as possible in their first package.

While this turned out to be true, a main reason was the way the Obama administration sold the stimulus. They used a set of economic projections that were hugely...