Leading Economists: Stimulus Helped, But Bush Bailouts Helped More

An overlooked item in yesterday's USA Today:

Eighteen months later, the consensus among economists is that the stimulus worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s. But the spending's impact was dwarfed by other crisis-fighting tools deployed by the Bush and Obama administrations, including costly efforts to stabilize crippled banks and the Fed's unconventional monetary policy.

"I think it was important for confidence. ... But fiscal stimulus was the least important of the three planks of the government's strategy," said Harvard University's Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

thumbs up means it's not socialism

Seemingly this would be good news for the GOP that greatly opposed Obama's stimulus legislation. That would require Republicans to accept the fact that Bush's socialization of the insurance and lending industries actually happened. That might be too much reality for Republicans to grasp, however. My guess is they will try and say that Bush's policies helped more than Obama's without actually saying what Bush's policies really were. They'll probably try to say Bush's socialized bailout program was actually a fiscally conservative Patriotic approach to rescuing the economy and Obama's was a socialist-tyrannical takeover.

Remember these are the same people that proposed a numberless budget so no delusion is too much.