I know everyone reads Krugman anyway. But I think this is an important observation in this column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23krugman.html

The Obama administration is already restricting what it says and does based on the received-wisdom politics of cable news, instead of relying on the empirical effectiveness of policy as measure in the actual economy.

So Obama says, deficits are bad. We might need to cut the deficit to avoid a return to recession. But this is bad idea. It will not work. It will make things worse. That will mean millions more out of work and will result in the Democrats losing power. In the meantime it discredits what actually will work and is the best policy: spending a shitload more money right now to reduce unemployment. This is a really bad thing for a Democratic President to be saying.

Note, when we say that the stimulus bill worked but wasn’t big enough, that’s not an ideological observation. It’s based on something that virtually all economists agree on: government spending that is not funded by taxes will stimulate demand. The few that claim otherwise have to do so in the face of the success of the Keynesian measures taken first in response to the Depression and later during WWII. When the government spends more demand goes up. It doesn’t vanish anywhere else, nor would you expect it do so, nor does anyone expect it to do so, conservative or liberal.

The argument that the conservatives make is that long-run the additional debt incurred will be a drag on economic growth sometime in the future (though NOT immediately) through taxes. And again, liberal economists do not disagree with that idea - they just think that the long-term economic costs of the borrowing required are (much) smaller than the long-term economic costs of the damage to business, education, employment, and social services that will be incurred if the economy is left with demand far below capacity. This is a simple argument - it is about whether the current emergency warrants borrowing from future income. It is, a little like a household in this one way: if a flood was coming and you could spend $10,000 to prevent $100,000 in damage to your house, would you put it on your credit card? The honest conservative argument amounts to a claim that the damage will be less than we claim and the cost will be more, not that the proposed remedy of spending more money won’t fix it short-term. And, well, the damage is adding up, and that argument is looking less credible

That is, nobody seriously disagrees that a stimulus package will generate jobs - except zombie conservatives in conflict with historical fact….

And those are the guys whose concerns the President is addressing. Great.