What Debate? Economists Agree the Stimulus Lifted the Economy http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/upshot/what-debate-economi...
Once again: Yes, the stimulus worked. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-stimulus-wo...
"Internet economics" and the discussion is full of fringe theories that refer to mises.org. For them every mainstream economist is Keynesian. Even if they belong to Chicago school.
As for employment, if you actually look at the numbers, its people over 55 who can't afford to retire doing service jobs. The participation rate is trash and young people are fucked.
#recovery
I have no idea what you're referring to, but if it's TARP then that's totally false. The government made a profit on the bailout.
The vast majority of the securities which the government bought up had intrinsic values higher than what the fear-driven market was pricing them at.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bailout-high...
If the assets bought under QE were sold for 50 cents on the dollar (for example), even the most bearish investors would be lining up to buy in droves. Of course, that applies to investors with actual money behind their beliefs rather than random internet commentators who can pull valuations out of nowhere.
For me, the question of whether it worked is scientific. Did the people who proposed the stimulus correctly predict the future results of it?
No. Nobody predicted our current economy, and the prediction's accurancy get even worse if we're about to slide into another recession in the next six months.
Of course you can argue that what we did was better than some hypothetical. That's so easy that it's not even an argument, which is why I don't consider it. What I observe is that the economy did not react as expected, we have not recovered anywhere near as much as predicted, interest rates are still being held low and we're talking about them going negative (again, I recall no predictions that such measures would be necessary seven+ years later), and a wide variety of indicators that were supposed to turn positive never have, or just barely have, shortly before what is very likely a recession.
The theories aren't working. Their predictions don't come true. Given that the theories don't work, it is scientifically foolish to then use those theories to themselves predict what couldhave shouldhave happened if some other course of action was taken, since the theories are already visibly nonfunctional. It is circular logic to use the broken theories to predict that the broken theories told us the right thing to do. This probably goes a long ways towards explaining why economics is still the "dismal science". (Though, to be sort of fair, economics does not have a lock on that error.) I don't have to have a better theory to say that; I need only have predictions in my hand and their failure to come true.
But how long will the stock market still be up, and why is it that over the course of those years the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer? Don't suppose it had anything to do with directly redistributing money upwards?
I'd love to see any evidence for the notion that the poorer have gotten poorer since 2008. (I don't dispute that the rich have gotten richer.)
FYI median household income is up since 2008: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3kv6
2008: 28 million
2016: 45 million