The following passage is from one of my all-time favorite books.  The book is Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, which was published the year that he passed, 1996.  The passage is found in the book's second chapter, Science and Hope.  In my edition, it begins at the bottom of page 36 and continues onto page 37 thusly:

At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, "To physics and metaphysics."  By "metaphysics," people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them.  They could also have included pseudoscience.  Wood answered along these lines:

The physicist has an idea.  The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make.  He consults the scientifics literature.  The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes.  Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it.  The experiment is painstaking.  Many possibilities are checked.  The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced.  He lets the chips fall where they may.  He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches.  At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless.  So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other.  The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

This is at least part of the problem in macroeconomics, though it is not the fault of the macroeconomist.  Would that there was such a lab, because then we could perhaps avoid all of the sound and fury of recent weeks.  Instead, we live in a society where people like Paul Krugman, who is well-educated and established in the field of economics, not to mention recently recognized by those prestige-bestowing Swedes, is placed alongside someone like Amity Shlaes.

Amity Shlaes is everywhere, including the Daily Show and NPR.  She's like the Tom Joad of depression-era historical revisionism.  She has a BA in English.  She's married to the guy who founded the New York Sun.  Somehow, this qualifies her to be a "senior fellow" over at the CFR, for those of you who take that sort of thing seriously.  However, she is not now, nor has she ever been, an economist.  She does not have an education in economics and it shows.

She has no shortage of economic dogma though.  This low-calorie Ayn Rand has been leading the recent charge to make sure that everyone knows that the New Deal did nothing to ease the economic woes of the day and may have actually made things quite a bit worse.

Part of what's going on here is one of my top-five pet peeves, which is what modern media hacks pretend is journalism.  It's a practice that goes something like this: "Hmm.. Krugman's an economist, but he's also a liberal, so we need someone who's not a liberal to say the opposite of what he's saying.  That way we can stand guard as referees and look very serious and concerned and impartial and no one can have cause to call us bad names like liberals or weenies or liberal weenies, especially not from the ivory tower of AM radio."

The other part of what's going on is described in the passage I've quoted above.  Macroeconomics deals with the interactions of whole nations of people over large periods of time.  It's quite possibly one of the most damnable things to try and understand.  It's also a field that's been more philosophical, and frequently treading into the nakedly ideological, in its origins, only recently getting beyond immature theoretical constructs like purely rational agents and perfect information.  Again, this is not because macroeconomists are not smart, but rather because this is the best they can do sans ideal laboratory conditions.

This does make it more difficult for the average joe to tell who is or isn't making shit up wholesale, but it nevertheless leaves us with the equivalent of putting Brian Greene up on the television screen next to Gene Ray from timecube.com.  That would look a little something like this:

"Mr. Greene, you're a popular explainer of contemporary physics, but today we have Mr. Ray with us, who has his own theories.  Mr. Ray?"

"YOU ARE EDUCATED RETARDED I POSSESS CUBIC WISDOM OF NATURE'S HARMONIOUS TIME CUBE MEANING FOUR SEPARATE DAYS IN ONE EARTH'S DAY ROTATION."

"That's very interesting, Mr. Ray.  Mr. Greene, would you care to comment?"

"Please kill me."

You get the idea.

Of course, Krugman is occasionally willing to talk a bit over some heads in his lay writings.  So, nevermind the fact that there's essentially a universal consensus, if at least partially theoretical, on spending being more stimulative.  Nevermind that you can't find a serious economist to refute this (sure, Stephen Moore will do it).  It really doesn't matter because you can put Amity Shlaes on every televsion and radio program in the country and she'll say what they won't and no one, not even the venerable Neil Conan, will go to any lengths to point out that she's as qualified to analyze economic histograms as she is to analyze the water vapor content of the Martian atmosphere.

Apologies to my fellow Dagger, Deadman, but spending is stimulative.  You rightly note that we can quibble about the details of implementation, about the long-term effectiveness of various tranches, but to flatly say that spending is not stimulative puts you in company with the likes of Laura Ingraham.  These are the same people who don't want to spend money on education, despite a Congressional study that discovered that every dollar spent on education under the GI Bill came back to the economy seven times over.

The worst part about our system is that people who are obstructing action, the people willing to tirelessly flog others with their expired ideology, will not count themselves among the over half a million newly jobless in January.

Welcome to February.

PS - You're not really supposed to love the bomb.  Kubrick didn't either.