How come even Democrats are against Obama's "Job Bill" aka "Stimulus 2" aka "Vote on it before you read it"?

You're talking about a gap on the order of twelve-hundred-fifty billion dollars, and we're trying to plug that with four-hundred-something, so we've got a long way to go," Baker says. (The stimulus package of roughly $800 billion doles out spending and tax cuts over two years.) Galbraith, too, says that demonstrating that the stimulus is too small is a matter of basic math. The $400 billion it will inject into the economy each of the next two years is equal to about two to three percent of GDP, he noted.

But the economy is falling at a much faster rate, projected at eight percent a year by the CBO - and that projection, again, doesn't account for the financial collapse. If it's too small, how is it, then, that economic models like the Congressional Budget Office's show that the economy will turn around sometime in 2009 or 2010? The harsh reality: they're just guessing.

And they're guessing based on economic models, says Galbraith, that have been built post-World War II and don't take into account the collapse of the financial sector. Instead, they assume the credit markets will be there to help ease the nation out of the downturn. "We're in a unique crisis in the financial sector, something we've never seen in our lives: a crisis of the insolvency of the largest banks," Galbraith says.

"Those banks, until they are reorganized and restructured, will not be part of a new credit expansion." The current crisis is qualitatively different than any recession that the current projections are based on. If they're wrong, then - given the small size of the stimulus -- there will be no turnaround in 2010.

Instead, the economy will careen out of control, unemployment will continue to rise, production will slow, etc. The White House acknowledges the severity. "We're in a very serious situation," Obama's economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, told ABC News' "This Week." "This is worse than any time since the Second World War. It's worse than, I think, most economists like me ever thought we would see."

Democrats, including President Obama, have referenced the CBO modeling by making the claim that there is a gap of one trillion dollars between actual economic production and potential economic production. If that's the case, then it would seem that the stimulus should be enough to turn things around. "They're taking the word of technicians who are running a model that has no financial sector in it," repeats Galbraith, noting that during the Great Depression "the collapse of the banking sector was critical to the collapse and lack of resilience in the economy."

There was no economic modeling being done in the 1920s or 1930s, however. Not even Galbraith, however, is absolutely certain that he and others who are similarly sour on the size of the stimulus are correct. We live in an uncertain world, as Robert Rubin likes to say.

But think of it like Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal famously argued that you might as well believe in God because if you're wrong, all you've done is waste a few Sundays. If you wager there's no God and you're wrong, well, God help you.

In the same way, if the government follows the Galbraithian advice to go big and spends everything it can to turn the economy around and it goes too far, the worst thing you get is some inflation - which can be pulled back with interest rate hikes - and a higher national debt. (The Senate version raises the debt ceiling to $13 trillion.) Of course, the stimulus number isn't driven by economics, but by politics, despite occasional attempts to assert otherwise.

Only an economist can answer this. I wouldn't begin to hazard a guess since it would just be pulling numbers out of the air.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.