On a plane here soon this morning so just a quick post…you will recall that I am a skeptic about the "recovery" rhetoric, largely because people are just hammered so hard now, after years of no real wage increases, that the concept of when the "recovery" comes will be mostly relevant for government statisticians and economists. Today this is out:

Even as the Obama administration braces for another grim report about job losses on Friday, economists say that the president’s $787 billion stimulus package has helped blunt the downturn in limited but discernible ways. A report card on the stimulus plan offered by analysts nearly six months after it was passed by Congress suggests that the punch from increased government spending has helped the economy begin to bottom out faster than it would have otherwise. The tax cuts included in the plan, economists said, have had less of an impact because people tended to save the money or use it to pay down debt rather than spend it.

   You may recall that many people thought the stimulus package shoud be much bigger given the depth of the decline in employment. But, the Administration did not buy those arguments. But, more important, why are people surprised that millions of people who were on the precipice would not run out and spend those few hundreds bucks, but rather wuld put it under the mattress? I’m not.