I suspect Grunwald is about to find out what actually happened to that little boy who called out the naked emperor in that old fairy tale. (You didn’t think the courtiers who invested so much effort in fooling the public really just shrugged and let the kid get away with it, did you?)

Author Michael Grunwald appeared on an FDL Book Salon over the weekend to describe what happened regaring the Obama stimulus and the effects of later austerity . Clearly the Administration failed to even mention the stimulus from about mid-2009 on, and neglected all of the policies that actually did ameliorate the recession and invest in future growth. But when Grunwald suggests, as he did both in the book salon and on Up With Chris Hayes this weekend that we avoided austerity, I don’t think the record supports his claim.

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.