Economists don't agree with Romney camps attacks on Obama's stimulus policies - Ezra Klein, WaPo

[Bill USA]

here we go again with more bald-faced lies by the Romney campaign (I know, they think since they're Republicans they should be given a pass on expectations of honesty, but some of us (non-Republicans) feel not distorting reality till it's not even recognizable is not something that should be tolerated).

(emphases my own)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/08/economists-to-romney-campaign-thats-not-what-our-research-says/

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The Romney campaign then turns to the Obama administration’s response to the recession. [font color="red"]“The negative effect of the administration’s ‘stimulus’ policies has been documented in a number of empirical studies,”[/font] they write. [font size="+1"]When Dylan Matthews surveyed the literature, he found 15 studies, of which 13 found the stimulus had a positive effect.[/font] But the Romney campaign only names two studies. One is by John Taylor, a Stanford economist who advises Romney and is, as luck would have it, one of the economists the Romney campaign tapped to coauthor this brief. That leaves one study that is not by a Romney-affiliated economist: Amir Sufi and Atif Mian’s look at the “Cash for Clunkers” program.

Sufi, an economist at the University of Chicago, is quick to point out that his paper did not show a negative effect for “the administration’s stimulus policies.” His paper was just about Cash for Clunkers. “This was a $4 billion program. It’s nothing, basically. We weren’t saying anything specific about broader stimulus programs, we were just looking at these programs to bring forward purchases of durable goods.”

So I asked Sufi what he thought of the stimulus more broadly. “Most of the research is pretty positive on stimulus,” he said. In particular, he pointed to a paper from Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson that used “cross-sectional data that seems to indicate the fiscal multiplier is quite large when you’re in a recession.”

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[font size="+1"]So even the studies that the Romney campaign’s economists handpicked to bolster their case don’t prove what the Romney campaign says they prove. And some of the key policy recommendations that flow from those studies are anathema to the Romney campaign. And in perhaps the key policy area highlighted by these studies, the Romney campaign doesn’t have a formal policy. If this is the best they can do in support of their economic plan, well, it’s not likely to quiet the critics.[/font]

.....There is much more in the article. It really is a Good Read.