> I know I'm just a lowly programmer and engineer who shouldn't opine about economics very much, but I observe simply this: The "stimulus" didn't work.
That's not an observation, that's a conclusion that requires a prior conclusion on a hypothetical that requires substantial economic analysis to have any credibility on: to wit, what the economy would have done without the stimulus.
My read is that the monetary stimulus by the Fed did exactly the prevention of imminent disaster that it was supposed to do. It didn't do the kind of improvements that take fiscal policy to do -- because it wasn't fiscal policy -- which isn't a difference of degree of magnitude, but kind.
> I find arguments about how it wasn't big enough to be null, because it isn't clear that we could have afforded much more
The only arguments I've seen about insufficient quantity of stimulus have been about the government (not Fed) fiscal stimulus of 2009 (ARRA and related bills). Given the low price of government borrowing, its quite obvious that we could have spent a lot more in (and since) 2009 on fiscal stimulus; the reason we didn't is political, not available-resources driven.
But that's a whole different thing than the Feds monetary stimulus.
> It's been 8 years now we've been on this policy.
What policy, exactly? Most of the Feds particularly intense monetary stimulus finished several years ago and has been in winding-down/settlement for the last few years, ditto with fiscal stimulus under ARRA. And 8 years ago (early 2008) was before the crisis and stimulus responses; if you are talking about the stimulus -- both monetary and fiscal -- adopted in response to the 2008/9 crisis, it started less than 8 years ago, and the intense policy ended several years ago, so in no sense have we been on a common stimulus policy for eight years.
> Nobody 8 years ago would have predicted what happened.
Both Austrians and Keynesians (among others) predicted that the actual stimulus that was engaged in by the Fed and government would fail to achieve what people wanted from stimulus (for, naturally, radically different reasons). To say that no one predicted the failure of the stimulus that was adopted is, simply, incorrect.