These days everybody thinks they're an economist.

Count me as not one of "these" or to be more grammatically correct, one of "those" I'm not an economist, I don't pretend to be one and I didn't sleep at a Holiday Inn last night...I admit the whole battling economists (the ones who really are economists) over will the stimulus bill work or won't it, is confusing.

I have no idea who to really believe either, which is why I recommend reading the title lined Newsweek piece. Especially this part:

For a view from the reasonable center, I went to Harvard's Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and an erstwhile adviser to John McCain who has a reputation for intellectual evenhandedness—and who was prescient about the current financial crisis. "There is tremendous skepticism, both based on theory and empirical evidence, about how much good all this is going to do," said Rogoff. "But there's also a recognition that the situation is so dangerous it has to be tried." Rogoff recalled going to a meeting of the American Economic Association two weeks ago. "You would find a number of people who were sure that tax cuts were the best way to have fiscal stimulus. Others say government spending. And a large number of us were not absolutely sure. There just isn't consensus about this."

Some economists, like Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon, are absolutely sure of the opposite: "I think this is the introduction to a disaster," Meltzer says. "We're going to face a big inflation. Everybody talks about how much we need to do now. But no one talks about how we're going to unwind what we're doing now." Meltzer has been warning for months that the dramatic slashing of interest rates and surge of government spending—increased now by the nearly $1 trillion the stimulus will cost—is going to take the country back to 1970s-style "stagflation." "Keynesian theory is wrong," Meltzer said. "It doesn't work. I was honorary adviser to the Bank of Japan for 16 years. They put in bullet trains to every town and village in Japan. They paved over every piece of unpaved land. But it was only when they got around to easing their monetary policy that things started to improve."

Actually that didn't work too well either for the Japanese, who are still dragging.

If it works, people will be lauding the brillance of Obama and the Democrats, if it fails? It's going to hurt much more than the loss of pride in being wrong...