This Crisis Is Way Bigger Than Dead Banks and Wall Street Bailouts

Barack Obama's presidency began in hope and goodwill, but its test will be its success or failure on the economics. Did the president and his team correctly diagnose the problem? Did they act with sufficient imagination and force? And did they prevail against the political obstacles -- and not only that, but also against the procedures and the habits of thought to which official Washington is addicted?

The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind that program, and there may not be one, until the first report of the new Council of Economic Advisers appears next year. We therefore resort to what we know about the economists: the chair of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers; the CEA chair, Christina Romer; the budget director, Peter Orszag; and their titular head, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. This is plainly a capable, close-knit group, acting with energy and commitment. Deficiencies of their program cannot, therefore, be blamed on incompetence. Rather, if deficiencies exist, they probably result from their shared background and creed -- in short, from the limitations of their ideas.

The deepest belief of the modern economist is that the economy is a self-stabilizing system. This means that, even if nothing is done, normal rates of employment and production will someday return. Practically all modern economists believe this, often without thinking much about it. (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it reflexively in a major speech in London in January: "The global economy will recover." He did not say how he knew.) The difference between conservatives and liberals is over whether policy can usefully speed things up. Conservatives say no, liberals say yes, and on this point Obama's economists lean left. Hence the priority they gave, in their first days, to the stimulus package.

But did they get the scale right? Was the plan big enough? Policies are based on models; in a slump, plans for spending depend on a forecast of how deep and long the slump would otherwise be. The program will only be correctly sized if the forecast is accurate. And the forecast depends on the underlying belief. If recovery is not built into the genes of the system, then the forecast will be too optimistic, and the stimulus based on it will be too small.

Consider the baseline economic forecast of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency lawmakers rely on to evaluate the economy and their budget plans. In its early-January forecast, the CBO measured and projected the difference between actual economic performance and "normal" economic performance -- the so-called GDP gap. The forecast has two astonishing features. First, the CBO did not expect the present recession to be any worse than that of 1981-82, our deepest postwar recession. Second, the CBO expected a turnaround beginning late this year, with the economy returning to normal around 2015, even if Congress had taken no action at all.

With this projection in mind, the recovery bill pours a bit less than 2 percent of GDP into new spending per year, plus some tax cuts, for two years, into a GDP gap estimated to average 6 percent for three years. The stimulus does not need to fill the whole gap, because the CBO expects a "multiplier effect," as first-round spending on bridges and roads, for example, is followed by second-round spending by steelworkers and road crews. The CBO estimates that because of the multiplier effect, two dollars of new public spending produces about three dollars of new output. (For tax cuts the numbers are lower, since some of the cuts will be saved in the first round.) And with this help, the recession becomes fairly mild. After two years, growth would be solidly established and Congress's work would be done. In this way, the duration as well as the scale of action was driven, behind the scenes, by the CBO's baseline forecast.