Senior economic advisers to Barack Obama, the then US president-elect, turned away from a supersized fiscal stimulus because they doubted its practicality, according to a December 2008 internal memo.
The 57-page memo from Lawrence Summers, then the incoming director of the economic bureaucracy in the White House, lays out the thinking of the Obama administration in unprecedented detail. The memo was obtained by The New Yorker magazine.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/340286c8-4615-11e1-9592-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1kL8YJ4ug
Bingo, they knew it wouldn’t work.