Waiting for an apology ...

No, in this post I am not talking about Gates or Crowley.

I remember, in even just the last couple of weeks, how conservatives and then (predictably) journalists starting to say that the stimulus has failed.

I mean, I remember further back several months ago, when the stimulus debate was going on, and how Democrats and the White House were saying a couple of different things. First it was important to get moving on it right away, first thing for the new administration, because families were suffering at that moment, and more would suffer shortly. At the same time, the stimulus was going to take two years to run through, and wouldn’t ramp up fully until near the end of 2009. That’s because it takes time for money to leave DC and get out to the states and be slotted properly into projects. Now, the registered voter in me was pissed that it was going to take such a long time to get the stimulus working, but the accountant type in me approved of actually having procedures to make sure that at least most of the money was spent on real things (looking at you, Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and your bundles of money).

Now, in economics there is the concept of expectations, the idea that if you own a sandwich shop, and you think a bunch of a guys are going to be hired next week to work on a bridge down the road, maybe you hire a waitress now. That concept has been battling with the idea that we might slip into the second great depression, and we only recently learned the outcome. This past week, maybe two weeks after we were told the stimulus has failed, we are being told the economy slowed its decline this past quarter, only dropping one percent instead of the five or six percent of the first quarter and the last quarter of last year.

Of course, at least one economist (and probably more) was saying the stimulus had nothing to do with this better number. But since we know most reporters and all Republicans know nothing about economics, I think it is reasonable to expect them to apologize and concede the President really is the One, the Messiah who will deliver us to a new economy, and a new post-racial America where we all love each (eww, gross) and no one will be hungry and it will be the end of history, …. again.

Wait, the Messiah is black?