The Stimulus (pulled from a Facebook discussion)

This is something of a summary of my thoughts which were originally in response to a Facebook post started by Levi.   His posting linked to an article (link) discussing how President Obama's recent stimulus is having an effect, but it is perhaps a slower one than people expect.  His comment from reading the article was that turning around anything the size of the American economy would take time and that the large numbers of Americans who see the stimulus as a failure are being too impatient or perhaps not realizing that this is going to be a slow process.

In response, I argued that most of that problem is not so much with the American people as it has been with the messaging and communication of the White House and Congress on the issue.  We have been given dozens of projections which have consistently been very overly optimistic.  There have been regular communications of how things are getting better soon.  When the stimulus was passed, the projections of how bad things would be without it turned out to be better than reality, and the projects of how things would look with the stimulus looked to be wildly optimistic at best.   We are just leaving the time labeled by the administration as "Recovery Summer".  Though there have been some remarks from the President that recovery would take time, the overriding message for most of the year has been announcing that change is here and that things will be better soon.

The actual merits of the specific stimulus as well as the concept of using large scale government spending is something that my co-blogger and I very much disagree on and will certainly be a discussion in the near future here.  Regardless of the merits of the stimulus, however, the messaging from the White House has been terrible.  While I agree that we are, by and large, an impatient people, we are much more so when speed is part of the selling pitch.  I don't expect to sit down at a nice steakhouse and be served immediately, but if I were in McDonalds and had to wait for 20 minutes to get my food I would be pretty upset.  If you want to sell me on a long range plan for turning around the economy, fine, I'm wiling to listen and judge the plan on that merit, but when we emerge from the "Recovery Summer" program and there are very few positive economic indicators, can you really blame me for starting to doubt your plan?