Bruce Bartlett on government spending

Bruce Bartlett (see here) has an insightful post in the New York Times on the role of government spending.  Bartlett, a life-long Republican - is one of the view "reasonable" voices out there these days.  The post is worth ready in its entirety.

Bartlett looks at the components of the GDP and assesses their relative importance as a "stimulus" to the US economy.  His post includes the following data.

He says:

"Government’s role in economic growth turned negative in 2011 because of budget cuts, subtracting more than four-tenths of a percentage point from the real G.D.P. growth rate. Federal consumption and investment spending for both military and nonmilitary purchases fell in real terms relative to 2010, and cutbacks at the state and local level were especially severe, as teachers and other workers suffered layoffs, which subtracted almost three-tenths of a percentage point from real G.D.P. growth."

" I think that much of the criticism of the stimulus legislation on both sides of the political spectrum has been misplaced. Liberals tend to decry the small overall size of the original package, while conservatives say it was too big. But perhaps the very limited allocation for investment and consumption was the problem."

I think Bartlett gets it exactly right.  In my view, the Obama administration made a huge mistake by presenting the government spending efforts in the beginning of his term as "stimulus," since most of it was in a form that prevented future layoffs or wasn't particularly stimulative at all.  To be clear, I think preventing future layoffs in a recession was a good thing to do, but it wasn't a "stimulus."   And, again, to be clear, the Republicans ongoing argument that federal spending can't be stimulative is just crazy talk.  The data clearly contradicts that.