The reports of monthly sales numbers confirmed predictions that some of the spectacular gains of August had merely been achieved by moving up sales that would have happened in September…
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“Most of the idea of any stimulus is to pull spending up from the future, but it doesn’t make any sense to design a program that only pulls up spending by one month,” said Blinder, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration. “Why in the world would you make it a one-month program? The Germans didn’t do that. The British do that. When I designed a mock version of this I was thinking of it as a one-year or two-year program.”
Was the $3 billion wasted as a stimulus?
“Yeah, mostly,” he said.
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