Oh, Ya. The Stimulus Is Totally Working. For Sure. No Doubt.

Jillian Bandes | August 27, 2009 11:31 AM

After Christina Romer, chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, claimed the stimulus was "absolutely" working, a number of other economists latched on to her statement with conflicting claims of "Romer's right!" and "Romer's wrong!"

At Forbes, Thomas Cooley and Peter Rupert, try and inject some calm into the whole shenanigans. They're highly skeptical the stimulus will or has worked, but they're willing to examine all the evidence.

It is a bit like throwing the baby in the swimming pool to see if it swims.

At some future time, after careful parsing of the data and studying people's decisions, we may have a much better estimate of the effectiveness of debt-financed government spending of this sort. One should keep in mind, however, that the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the programs to combat the Great Depression in the 1930s is still a matter of great debate.