Ezra Klein Says That James Pethokoukis Is Worth Reading But Not
I confess I have never thought him a good read--for reasons well laid out by Ezra Klein here:
A weak argument against the stimulus: Reuters’ conservative economics columnist James Pethokoukis is a good read... so I was looking forward to his longer take on whether President Obama made the recession worse.... Pethokoukis begins with a big claim:
Instead of saving us from a Greater Depression, the Obama stimulus (together with his health-care plan and financial reforms) was a two-year waste of precious time and money that may actually have impeded economic growth.
That goes further than even the stimulus’s most ardent detractors tend to tread. As Doug Holtz-Eakin, chief economic adviser to John McCain during the 2008 campaign and current president of the American Action Forum, told me, “the argument that the stimulus had zero impact and we shouldn’t have done it is intellectually dishonest or wrong. If you throw a trillion dollars at the economy it has an impact, and we needed to do something.”... So what evidence does Pethokoukis offer for his position? Almost no evidence, actually. And what he does have calls the rest of the article into question.
Pethokoukis’s first argument is that the White House’s “own economists predicted the stimulus would prevent the unemployment rate from hitting 8 percent...." [T]hough it’s fine as a politician’s dishonest soundbite, it’s disqualifying for a serious economic commentator.... In general, I have actually found this to be a useful test: When economic commentators use this argument, I know not to take them seriously, because they either don’t know the facts or aren’t letting them stand in the way of their argument....
[H]is second piece of evidence suffers from much the same problem.... Pethokoukis... quotes an analysis by John Taylor.... Dylan and I found that of the nine serious efforts to estimate the stimulus, six found substantial positive effects, two found no effect, and one found a slight effect. Taylor’s paper was nowhere near the most convincing of the bunch, and Taylor, a longtime spokesperson for Republican economic policies, is not the most convincing messenger, either. But Pethokoukis neither attempts to deal with the flaws in Taylor’s study — he gestures toward one of them and then misuses a quote Larry Summers gave me about “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects — or the contrary results in, say, Feyrer and Sacerdote.
That’s ... it...