Money Magazine interviews Bruce Bartlett:
So are Republicans fighting the last war? What good are tax cuts when people have no income to tax? In this crisis we've run into the same problem we had in the Great Depression: a liquidity trap. Money isn't circulating. The stimulus package may have been over-sold by Obama, but the principle was correct. We need government spending to get out of the trap.
Do you support the idea of another stimulus package? No. The lags in implementation are so great that it would have no effect until long after the recovery is under way. And I think the makings of a fairly rapid recovery are here.
Nice to hear some optimism. My Republican friends, to a person, think that Obama's policies are going to be disastrous and that they'll be able to waltz into the White House in 2012. I keep asking, "What if you're wrong? What's your backup plan in case the economy does recover and Obama gets credit for bringing us out of the biggest crisis since the Depression?"