We've seen plenty of evidence that Americans—small-business owners and consumers alike—haven't been responding very well to President Bush's economic stimulus plan. The evidence has piled up so high that even supporters of the plan can't deny it. Harvard professor Martin Feldstein admits that he and other economists were too optimistic about the effects of stimulus on the economy.
Here are the facts. Tax rebates of $78 billion arrived in the second quarter of the year. The government's recent GDP figures show that the level of consumer outlays only rose by an extra $12 billion, or 15% of the lost revenue. The rest went into savings, including the pay down of debt.
But the lesson Barack Obama seems to have drawn from the failure of the stimulus plan is "if something doesn't work, just try harder." That's why he announced today an even more expensive stimulus plan of his own. Robb Mandelbaum has a more favorable analysis of the plan.
When the stimulus package was first announced, I reported on some of the skepticism regarding how helpful the plan was going to be for small-business owners. That skepticism now seems to have been validated: Short-term influxes of cash don't significantly alter the behavior of small-business owners, one reason being that long-term planning is what they care about, and the economy is just too uncertain right now. That's why, as I explained in the article, many experts say that policies addressing permanent changes to the tax code and healthcare costs are what America's small businesses really need.
Fortunately, tax relief for small businesses' health insurance costs is part of Obama's platform, so he's getting that right—even if he's all too willing to repeat the mistakes of the past when it comes to stimulus.
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