There's no shortage of debate as to whether the Obama administration and Congress have done the right things in attempting to avert a debt crisis and revive the stalled economy.
Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute, a Japanese think tank, says that government spending is the key to getting the economy back on track -- and that 2009's massive stimulus package didn't go far enough.
While Koo's kind of thinking is decidedly unfashionable, there are good reasons to listen to him. A Japanese-born Taiwanese-American, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the 1980s. For the past 27 years he's lived in Japan, studying its economy in depth and writing what many consider the definitive analysis of Japan's "lost decade" -- "The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons From Japan's Great Recession."
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