Following up on my post yesterday about the stimulus, Robert Waldmann makes a good catch. Reihan Salam had said, “I don’t think that anyone doubts that ARRA helped perk up growth,” but it turns out that not only is this untrue, it’s spectacularly untrue. Here’s a CNN poll from a few weeks ago:
So 41% of American adults think the stimulus had no effect or made things worse. CNN doesn’t provide crosstabs, but I think it’s a pretty good guess that this belief is primarily held by conservatives and right-leaning independents who take their cues from conservative media. In other words, it’s likely that upwards of three-quarters or more of conservatives believe the stimulus had no effect.
That doesn’t happen unless conservative pundits and politicians are almost unanimously pushing exactly that belief. There might be a few conservative thinkers out there who are offering up judicious, nuanced conclusions about the stimulus, but their effect on public discourse in general is nil. Among the vast majority of conservative opinion leaders, not only is it untrue that few people doubt ARRA helped perk up growth, but apparently virtually everyone doubts that ARRA helped perk up growth.
