June 01, 2010
I’m not sure of the point of David Brooks’ column today other than to fill space and earn his paycheck, but one of the items on his list of complaints simply does not make any sense. He tells readers, presumably in reference to the stimulus, that “the money is spent.”
It’s not clear what Brooks thinks he means by this. Insofar as the country still suffers from high unemployment (Brooks tells us in the next paragraph, “unemployment will not be coming down soon”) there is no lack of money for additional stimulus. The government can have the Fed hold the debt issued to finance the spending so as not to increase the interest burden on the Treasury in future years. (The Fed refunds its interest to the receipts.) So there is no plausible meaning to the idea that “the money is spent”. This just seems to be a case of Brooks wanting to express his generic unhappiness with the current situation.
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