Krugman is correct but he's not right! He is brilliant on economics, naive on GOVERNANCE!

[cthulu2016]

64. The point is that the real world exists

The difference between 850-B and 2 trillion represents a real world difference in where unemployment, federal tax revenues, state balance sheets and national GDP will be in two years.

If you know that you can only get a small package and that with the small package the economy will continue to suck then you would be thinking in terms about how to deal with the real-world certainty that the economy will still suck... how to handle the politics of it, as well as the policy.

By taking ownership of the "just right" economic package Obama was taking ownership of where the economy would be down the road.

Obama is smart man and a good politician so when he took ownership of it--versus saying, this is not enough and will not work--he must have been optimistic about where the economy was heading. (He must also have bought into some of the nonsense about how a huge package had a downside in that it would would create inflation and higher interest rates. Any package that worked would, of course, raise inflation and interest rates... that's the objective of the stimulus! In 2009 the CPI was -0.8% and we couldn't have stood many eyars like that.)

If he thought it was going down further he would never have taken political ownership of it.

That is why I reject the current, "oh, we knew it was too small" line. Obama isn't that dumb!