>My second question was about what could have been accomplished had the
>money been spent a different way. But what I was mainly wondering is where
>the economy might be *without* all this deficit spending. Doug Henwood says
>"in the soup" and I'm sure that's a technical term, but I was hoping for
>some ideas about what the actual numbers might be.
How could anyone ever guess? I'm sure some whiz with a macro model could say "GDP growth would be 2 percentage points less than it would otherwise have been" (r2=.02), but who knows? The risk was that without the spending, a deflationary spiral could have been unleashed, so the model's projections would have been useless.
Doug