Matthew Yglesias » The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Cut Taxes Substantially

Matthew Yglesias » The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Cut Taxes Substantially: "the main problem facing right-of-center and left-of-center proponents of fiscal stabilization alike, namely that the political mechanism of enacting discretionary stimulus through congress is extremely clumsy and leads to bad policy outcomes. The most helpful thing to do before the next downturn would be to establish in advance a reasonably streamlined way of preventing state and local government from hiking taxes and cutting services in the middle of a recession.