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…

“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.