Arnold Kling channels his inner Walter Block (HT: Cafe Hayek) and asks whether the government spending multiplier is 1.57 universally, or just over some restricted range. Two gut reactions:

1. My first thought is that discussions of the spending multiplier are probably like "economic impact" studies for stadiums and Super Bowls, though my prior is that the people doing the calculating in this case are more competent. Still, Kling asks the right question: if the multiplier is 1.57 over the entire range of government spending levels, then why are we stopping at a trillion dollars? If government spending is the wellspring of prosperity, why stop? People probably start to anticipate spending increases in the same way they start to anticipate inflation and, therefore, any short-run gains from government spending have to be gains from unanticipated spending. A bleg: cites on this?

2. The Keynesian story is that government spending is needed to solve a collective action problem that would otherwise produce insufficient aggregate demand. For a useful explanation of this, here's one of my grad school mentors Steve Fazzari on EconTalk.