No one could have predicted....

Ezra Klein said this a couple of days ago:

The original stimulus package should've been bigger. Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, says the Treasury Department originally asked for $1.4 trillion. Sen. Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wanted $1.2 trillion. What we got was a shade under $800 billion, and something more like $700 billion when you took out the AMT patch that was jammed into the package. So we knew it was too small then, and the recession it was designed to fight turned out to be larger than we'd predicted. In the end, we took a soapbox racer to a go-kart track and then realized we were competing against actual cars. [....]
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Wrong. Ten percent unemployment and a terrible recession ended up discrediting the people trying to do more for the economy, as their previous intervention was deemed a failure. That, in turn, empowered the people attempting to do less for the economy. So rather than a modestly sized stimulus leaving the door open for more stimulus if needed, its modest size was used to discredit the idea of more stimulus when it became needed.

Oh wait, Paul Krugman predicted that this exact thing would happen. Hoped it wouldn't but, thought it was incredibly likely that it would:

So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

So lets recap, because the stimulus wasn't big enough, it is now starting to run out. Still leaving a massive hole in the economy.

So of course the problem was doing the stimulus in the first place. Not that it was inadequate. The is the simply Boolean logic our of political dialog. This was a problem of not thinking big enough and that is entirely the fault of the Administration. They played small ball here, and hoped. They constantly talk about the "Art of the Possible", that they forget sound policy will go much further.

-Cheers