No one, except maybe Paul Krugman, is out there making the Keynesian case for deficit spending.  It's like they assume people will just intuitively understand.

As long as Democrats continue to act like a balanced budget is an unalloyed good, even under these economic conditions, public opinion is not going to look very good for us.  Democrats have accepted the frame that government spending is out of control, which means they come off as vaguely embarrassed even by something like the stimulus that they should be proud to take credit for.  It's bad politics.

is a food & travel reporter. I've read a number of his columns for The Atlantic and I question his expertise and knowledge even on food. 

He's entitled to his opinion. But I'll note, he fails to consider the political repercussions of the inverse. 

was that so much of the money was wasted on things with little stimulative effect. About 9 percent of the cost was for fixing the alternative minimum tax, for instance. That will give some upper-income taxpayers more money to spend later this year, but it wasn't an immediate job-creating measure last year. We could have spent those tens of millions of dollars much more wisely.

The AMT would, through bracket creep, have applied to taxpayers in the $85,000 to $250,000 range. The patch keeps it above that.

Your definition of 'upper-income' is frankly laughable. The patch's definition is closer to accurate.

The stimulus is just the government kicking the can down the road again and postponing the inevitable. The banks are insolvent and once that becomes general knowledge, the market will crash in a big way.

Many second liens have little value because of the plunge in home prices, Rep. Frank wrote, adding: "Yet because accounting rules allow holders of these seconds to carry the loans at artificially high values, many refuse to acknowledge the losses and write down the loans."

The banks know they can't write down the loans because they are using the inflated values to make it appear like they have more assets than liabilities to prevent the FDIC from closing them down.

All the banks that the FDIC is closing down have 25-40% less assets than they claim on their balance sheets. The largest banks have 7-8 Trillion in assets, so if they are hiding their true assets at a similar rate to the other banks, we're talking about 2 Trillion in assets that do not exist. 

Is, frankly, a crappy way to frame the poll. If some pollster called me and asked if I was happy with the stimulus, I'd have to say "no". Because we needed a much bigger stimulus, focused much more squarely on job creation and less on tax cuts. Of course, I'm aware of the politics of it, and that this was what we could get through congress, but that doesn't make it all I'd hoped for. Plus, the unemployment rate hasn't gone down, which means that the stimulus hasn't really done it's job. (Of course, things would've been a whole HELL of a lot worse without it, but "we're spending 800B to keep things from getting worse than awful" isn't something to be pleased with.)

So, on the "dislike" side, you have the defecit hawks, the Tea Partiers, the Republicans who'll hate everything Obama even mentions in passing, everyone who's out of work (because they won't give a damn until they get a job) and folks like me who think we needed a bigger, better stimulus than the one we got. And yet, that only makes up 56% of the poll responses. Frankly, that's not too bad.