This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. As Congress moves ahead with

President Obama's stimulus plan, what will the impact of the legislation be?

And will it be on balance any better than doing nothing at all?

Heto Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds comments.

President Obama and more sharply Vice President Biden have made the point that there is essentially no

disagreement within the economics profession that a broad large government spending program is necessary to jumpstart, revive,

bring the economy out of recession?

Yeah, it's one thing to ignore the people who disagree with you.

It's another to say they don't exist.

Cato put out an ad with 250 leading economists and among them three Nobel laureates saying spending is not the way to to help

quote-unquote jumpstart the economy. It's never worked no one can point to an example

when it did. And in my own pieces in the National

Review and the Wall Street Journal, I go through quite a few academic studies as well as the logic of it all that seriously question it.

They are at the IMF torn between the International Monetary Fund, torn between some who say the multiplier might be as

high as one meaning a dollar of government spending gives you a dollar that's

nothing and some who say it might be below zero that is to say and they they use

for an example, obvious examples.

One is Denmark, but another is Ireland.

Ireland cut government spending by 7% of GDP.

That's like us eliminating two pentagons.

And nothing bad happened, only wonderful things happened.

The economy turned around, they started importing people, not just Irish people, but others.

...