When President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law on February 17, 2009, the program’s place in American history was widely remarked. It was the greatest stimulus effort since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

But this was incorrect: By every measure, Obama’s stimulus was far greater than FDR’s New Deal.

My initial reaction to Sabotage: How the Republican Party Crippled America’s Economic Recovery was an incredulous, “Jeez, will anyone really get snookered into blaming the Republicans for that at this point in affairs?” And then yesterday happened, and we all realized we’d probably have to vote for Obama again, because the conservatives will always be better at the whole “nihilism” thing than liberals. This book is a useful source of the talking points Democratic Party operatives will repeat so relentlessly between now and November they might actually succeed in dissuading any self-respecting leftist who can still afford cable from voting at all.

Larry Summers, Obama’s former chief economic adviser and now returned to Harvard, has a business proposition for the US economy, and though there’s a hint of a wink to it, I think he’s deadly serious. But to read it, you have to put aside for now whatever views you might retain about his previous tenures. If you can’t do that, you can stop here.

The arrogance of power comes through loud and clear here. Larry Summers and Robert Rubin did their business, and they will never admit to being wrong.

Earlier this week I chronicled the backlash against Jim Yong Kim, President Obama’s nominee to run the World Bank. That has continued, including a critique from a close pal of Larry Summers.

Just to be clear, what the resigning midlevel exec in the GS London office said in his New York Times op-ed was that the culture at Goldman Sachs was such that its clients were being bilked by trading schemes knowingly designed to rip them off, while the GS execs laughed about how gullible their “muppet” clients were for trusting them. That was shocking, but it wasn’t unfair or news.

We’ve seen several retrospectives of the Administration’s actions to deal with the economic crisis in 2009-2010, and Ryan Lizza has a new one in the New Yorker. His recounting of the memos and exchanges between Larry Summers and Obama add to the view of Summers inducing Obama to pull his punches for political reasons, ensuring the stimulus would be too small.

You just can’t get rid of zombie Larry Summers. He can get drummed out of Harvard. He can see the deregulation policies he pushed in the Clinton Administration lead to a financial meltdown. He can preside over a sluggish economy for two years during the Obama Administration, after which Congress flips to the opposition. Now he reportedly wants to head the World Bank.

The trade deficit between the United States and the rest of the world was the major imbalance in the global economy in the last decade. It created the gap in demand that was filled by the stock bubble in the 90s and the housing bubble in the last decade. It is striking that the Post’s opinion pages are only open to people who try to conceal this fact rather than economists who try to explain this history to readers.

An article in Forbes reveals those at the top 0.1 percent in personal income in the country captured about half of the capital gains, which are currently taxed at just 15 percent. That makes this a prime mechanism for creating and increasing income inequality.