Audacity itself as economic experiment

President-elect Obama proposes an unparalleled test of Keynes' decades-old idea: that deficit spending on a grand-enough scale can inspire the confidence to right a sinking economy.

(Source Los Angeles Times)
President-elect Barack Obama will soon unveil a package of tax cuts and spending increases that, combined with already planned spending, would push Washington's 2009 deficit to between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion -- more than 10% of the economy's output. And he will argue that this tidal wave of federal expenditure should continue into next year, and perhaps beyond.
Only during World War II did U.S. government expenditures account for a greater share of economic activity, according to federal statistics. That's also true for virtually every other developed country. Read the whole article...