Why much of the $787b deployed in the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 remains unspent.

“Part of the answer is that big government (the stimulus) was slowed by good-government requirements (environmental impact reports, competitive bidding and the like) that didn’t exist in the ’30s. Also, strapped state and local governments laid off many of the workers needed to approve the stimulus projects. Layoffs and furloughs in California’s Office of Historic Preservation, the state’s inspector general told me this summer, created a 60-day bottleneck for even routine structural improvements.”