Paul Krugman notes again that while the stimulus is helping to stop some of the bleeding, it probably wasn’t enough. Many years of high unemployment could be ahead.
What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.
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But can we afford to do more? We can’t afford not to.