First, a disclaimer. I know there's not the testicular fortitude to push a second stimulus now. I also know it's simplistic to think economics can be cut and pasted. But I was curious what might happen if we merely reproduced the results of the last stimulus. So... I grabbed the good Speaker's Flickr stream, set the flux capacitor on PhotoShop, and was impressed by the resulting visuals.
First... private sector jobs. Let's take the progress since the beginning of 2009, and reproduce it exactly. The yellow line shows the real change to date. The green is a reproduction of the yellow.
That's 100,000 jobs being added each month by October 2011. I don't know which would scare Republicans more-- the results or the timing heading into 2012.
Retail sales:
Notice retail sales would be higher by September 2011 in this theoretical exercise than they were in December 2007-- nearly a year before the crash.
Next, manufacturing jobs:
Anyone opposed to 280,000 manufacturing jobs monthly? What's that worth to our nation? Well, actually, there may be a way to find out. If we could cut and paste the impact to household wealth...
That's an increase of more than $6-trillion in exchange for another $787-billion in stimulus spending.
Finally, let's not forget our friends on Wall Street:
That's a Dow at 15,000 next July in this cut and paste world.
While there are countless complexities (real estate comes to mind) that could drag down the impact of another stimulus, I'd suggest some of those factor would be offset by the lessons learned from the first stimulus. We could hope a second round would have more actual spending and fewer tax cuts for instance.
It was just interesting to me to see how much pain we could wipe away if only we could cut and paste the past, and the votes.