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The madness of crowds
...I'm less definitely a skeptic than Tyler--I'm more concerned by the composition of the stimulus than by its size. But Tyler's concerns are not unreasonable. Many of the concerns raised about the stimulus are not unreasonable. And the response to requests for better evidence are too often being met by enraged proponents metaphorically jumping up and down and screaming "Concede! Concede! Concede!" This is not usually the activity of someone who has solid empirical evidence and an irrefutable model backing him up. If the evidence is so overwhelming, why not just lay it out? What, exactly, is the model we're using; what are the assumptions about things like marginal propensity to consume; and what is the empirical evidence backing up these estimates? What's the justification, other than "it's a good way to fool the American people into supporting spending I want", for packaging so much permanent spending as stimulus, rather than debating those programs on their own merits?...