In a front page article about efforts by certain senators to cut back the size of the stimulus, the Post told readers that: "The stimulus package has now tripled from its post-election estimate of about $300 billion, and in recent days lawmakers in both parties have grown wary of the swelling cost." That's not the way I remember it. As I recall from those distant days, most discussions of the stimulus seemed to center on numbers between 2-3 percent of GDP. This comes to $300 billion to $450 billion a year, or $700 billion to $900 billion for a two-year package. Let's see what we can find in the Post from the early days following the election. Here we go: "Many members of Congress have speculated that the spending package could reach $500 billion or more, while some economists have predicted the government might spend as much as $1 trillion to restart the job-producing economic activity that has withered in the last year." That was December 6th. In other words, discussions of stimulus from the time around the election already put it a size close to what is being debated by Congress. The idea of a package that keeps expanding in size is an invention of the Post.
--Dean Baker
