Fiscal Stimulus

I have stayed away from the fiscal stimulus debate for now but I got something forwarded from this guy Ken Landon who is head of something or other at JPMorgan. He found this quote while wasting time on the Internet in the morning:

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent
before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we
have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to
boot! -- Roosevelt's U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, testimony to
the House Ways and Means Committee, May 9, 1939."

That is something to consider in the current climate and when trying to weigh whether a fiscal stimulus is likely to be efficacious but on second thought, the argument is totally spurious. Morgenthau has no idea what the counterfactual would have been like. So claiming that "it does not work" is just uninformed. You can make all sorts of arguments about crowding out about disincentivizing productive capital through an excessively regulatory environment, about an onerous tax burden for future generations, &c &c &c but just claiming that it is not working b/c unemployment is stable... that's just dumb. I mean, imagine we'd have a fiscal stimulus plan that had stabilized unemployment at 6.5% and we weren't at 7.2% right now (with more probably to come.) Would anyone say this wasn't working? It's such an elementary mistake.