Reply #20: Because of the reasoning.

[Igel]

Continuing current rates for the top earners was unwise because it added to the deficit. We simply couldn't afford it. The extension was seen as a big loss.

Then the extension that we couldn't afford turned out to be a small portion of the overall increase in the deficit due to the bill he signed. It was suddenly spun as a second Obama stimulus. In this, he made a defeat into a victory--but quite possibly at the risk of levering his victory into a much larger defeat.

Similarly, the Bush anti-recession stimuli in 2001/02 and in 2008 were panned as inevitably ineffective. Tax cuts, economists left of center, with Democrats loudly backing them, couldn't work. Tax cuts were included in the Obama stimulus in 2009 only as a ineffectual sop to repubs, even if many of the tax cuts were refundable tax credits. Except now the third stimulus for this recession is very like the first stimulus in being almost entirely "ineffective" tax cuts (distributed differently--the first was in the form of single-lump payments). And, unlike the horrors of the first stimulus added a couple hundred billion to the debt this one adds many hundreds of billions to the debt.