President Obama, scrambling to explain his alarmist statement that if we don’t pass the stimuls package “our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse,” said what he really had in mind was the experience of Japan in the 1990s, when a failure to act led to a decade of stagnation. In reality, the reverse is true. The Japanese government did act, and pursued some of the same infastructure spending policies that are now being touted by Obama.
