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Brace Bartlett highlights this CBO report (pdf) on the stimulus. The bottom line:

CBO estimates that in the third
quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to
1.6 million people were employed in the United States,
and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product
(GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would
have been the case in the absence of ARRA [American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act]...Those ranges are intended to reflect the uncertainty of
such estimates and to encompass most economists’ views
on the effects of fiscal stimulus.

Remember when Glenn Beck accused President Obama of winning followers like a totalitarian demagogue, warned against the nefarious tendencies of community organizers, and was himself defended against critics by Jonah Goldberg, who called Beck "a libertarian populist?” Now the cable television host is touting a "radical," details-to-be-announced mass movement that promises to save the United States. Its name: "The Plan."

It includes a series of adult education seminars where citizens will be taught political activism, self-reliance, and the dread community organizing. The often tearful Fox News personality also promises a book that will include more specifics.

"We need to start thinking like the Chinese," Mr. Beck said at a recent rally. "I’m developing a 100 year plan for America."

The weird thing is: some aspects of the current tea-party movement appeal to me. Its deep concern with debt and spending is shared by the Dish and has been since its inception. And a conservative critique of unrestrained capitalism - especially the reckless speculation and banking sector in the past decade - is vital if we are to save capitalism from itself. But Beck is not Richard Posner or Bruce Bartlett or Charles Murray, whose ideas are worth taking seriously. As Charles Murray puts it:

"Beck uses tactics that include tiny snippets of film as proof of a
person’s worldview, guilt by association, insinuation, and occasionally
outright goofs like the fake quote. To put it another way,
I as a viewer have no way to judge whether Beck is right. I have to
trust that the snippets are not taken out of context, that the dubious
association between A and B actually has evidence to support it, and
that his numbers are accurate. It is impossible to have that trust."

No wonder Palin feels a kindred spirit. The two of them represent the degenerate expression of cliches that used to be ideas (and ideas worth retaining and adjusting to new circumstances). But the vessel for rethinking will not come from proud ignoramuses and populist Elmer Gantrys. It will not come from reiterating propaganda but from confronting unpleasant facts about conservatism's recent catastrophic failures and mistakes.

Here he is explaining why Europe isn’t a zero growth dystopia:

In America, people tend to think of their federal taxes as money down a rat hole and react accordingly. But in Europe, the people are more apt to feel they are simply paying for services with their taxes that Americans have to pay out of pocket.

This fact is best illustrated by health care. Most Americans get health insurance through their employers. The cost reduced their cash wages by 7.9 percent on average in 2008 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If we had national health insurance and insurers were entirely relieved of this expense, they could afford to pay their workers 7.9 percent more and be no worse off. If the payroll tax went up by 7.9 percent to pay for health insurance, it would all be a wash, but both taxes and government spending would be higher. [...] The second reason why taxes have less of an impact on incentives in Europe than one might expect is because European countries raise much more of their revenue from consumption taxes than the United States does.

I thought its proposals were ill thought-through and that it would
have been better to take the time to develop something more coherent,
rather than making things up on the fly, which appears to be the case.

I also believe the administration has done a poor job of addressing
what I think is the biggest problem with the American health care
system: It costs too much for what we get. We spend in total twice as
much of our gross domestic product on health as most other major
countries without getting much in return for the extra spending.

Finally, I think the goal of universal coverage is a good one, but
the Obama proposal is not properly financed. I think a broad-based new
government benefit should be financed with a broad-based tax that is to
a large extent paid by the beneficiaries, as is the case with Social
Security.