German policymakers do think the United States is misguided as a matter of economic reasoning. “We think they’re wrong,” says one top official. “We think you don’t get the multiplier they say.” The multiplier is the measure of how much economic activity results from emergency government spending. Discussions of the multiplier were at the center of the debates over the Obama stimulus plan. Christina Romer and the president’s other economic advisers argued that the multiplier would be around 1.6—the government would create $1.60 worth of economic activity for every dollar it spent. At those rates, who can afford not to stimulate? “Our research says the multiplier is more like .60,” says the German official. If he is correct, then a stimulus plan can actually deaden an economy rather than stimulate it. If he is correct, you might have been as well off to have taken the stimulus money and thrown it away.
Absolutely right. Which means the Obama approach is even worse than the traditional Keynesian belief that you can stimulate the economy by burying money in fields and then paying people to dig it up. The Obamanomics approach is more like stacking it all in a pile (in a Union hall somewhere) and setting it on fire. Poof.
The Keynesians can't possibly come up with answers to those questions that make any sense in the real world.
As Albert Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results, and the Keynesians utterly qualify as insane.