Happy Birthday, Great Recession

I've started contributing occasional posts to the Economic Intelligence blog at U.S. News and World report.  My first post takes note of the fact that the Great Recession began five years ago and revisits a number of themes about fiscal policy and dealing with downturns that I have been blogging about for almost as long.  Here's the motivation for the birthday wishes:

The mantra that guided both the small stimulus legislation signed by President George W. Bush in January 2008 and the much larger stimulus legislation signed by President Barack Obama a year later was that fiscal stimulus should be "timely, targeted, and temporary." The Brookings Institution went so far as to publish a primer on fiscal stimulus emphasizing this approach. One can only hope that with five years of hindsight and a continuing struggle to recover from the Great Recession, this approach has been discredited. 

I also spent some time discussing the fiscal cliff on a radio program last evening.  Listen here.