Today, the Washington Post has a letter to the editor about counting stimulus efforts. I think the letter is pithy and on-point, but that might be because I wrote it. Anyway, my conclusion is:
[T]here have already been two rounds of stimulus since the recession started in December 2007. The first, enacted in February 2008 (when I served at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers), provided $168 billion in tax cuts for families and businesses. The second, enacted in February of this year, provided $787 billion in various spending programs and tax cuts. The question we face today is whether to enact a third stimulus, not a second one.
The letter was a response to an editorial the Post ran last Friday.
Stimulus aficionados will recognize that, in the interest of brevity, I used dollar amounts that aren’t completely apples-to-oranges. As noted in my previous post on this topic, the $168 billion amount for the first stimulus reflects the gross amount of stimulus in the first couple of years; the long-run, net cost budget cost of the bill is lower. The $787 billion amount for the second stimulus is the ten-year net cost; the initial stimulus is a bit larger. I think the gross impact is a better way to characterize the stimulus effort, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone by referring to an $800+ billion stimulus, when everyone knows it as $787 billion.