On: Nate Silver: Double Dip or Not, Economy Is Falling Farther Behind

[yummyfajitas]

Austerity by the states and local governments has outstripped stimulus by the federal government.

False. Total government spending (in $B):

    2006  $4698
    2007  $4926
    2008  $5335
    2009  $5896

http://usgovernmentspending.com/spend.php?span=usgs302&y...

(State and local numbers for 2010 are not yet available.)

[Anechoic → yummyfajitas]

Your numbers don't address his comment.

The recession started in late 2007 and became apparent in late 2008. Efforts to address the recession (the Stimulus package) weren't implemented until 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm...) so that's the baseline. To show his comment is false we need the spending numbers for 2010 and YTD 2011. The site doesn't have solid numbers yet, but the "guesstimate" for 2010 ($5,799) indicates that krschultz is right.

[krschultz → Anechoic]

That's a great point, thanks for looking it up I hadn't even thought of looking at it in pure dollar terms.

I was actually talking about this: 'Government employment is now 1.9 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery, a drop of 430,000 jobs. In contrast, government employment rose by 1.1 percent (or 232,000 jobs) during the equivalent part of the last recovery.'

Pretty much anytime government employment is going DOWN, it is hard to argue that the response has been in any way keynesian.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/what-mak...