Is this how Obama gets QE3 done? What’s the name for this again?

U.S. President Barack Obama might like to call it a “jobs bill,” but opponents of his $447 billion recovery measure prefer a different label: stimulus.

And why wouldn’t they? Over the past two years, the notion of using government spending to jump-start a recovery has been thoroughly discredited with voters, if not with most economists.

But if stimulus has few defenders today, it used to have a lot more. As Ezra Klein, a Bloomberg View columnist, pointed out recently, it was popular with Republicans through at least the early 2000s.

Various luminaries in the pantheon of conservative thought have also endorsed the idea. As I noted a few months ago, President Calvin Coolidge defended the use of public works to encourage hiring during a recession. And even Frederic Bastiat, of “Broken Window” fame, was open to a certain sort of stimulus spending.

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