Finance committee  That's a good point; thank you for it. I think we have to be aware that we don't want to be injecting extra stimulus at the time when the economy starts to recover and strengthen. And we are among the more optimistic forecasters about seeing a V-shaped recovery rather than perh

Finance committee  That's one of the points I mentioned earlier. This is a big budget with big spending measures. If we look at the issues, over the last number of years government revenues have been stronger than expected, year in and year out. That's because this little thing called the income mu

Finance committee  Sure. The problem is that by the time any of this money gets into the economy we're looking at perhaps the second quarter to the second half of 2009. So when you look at the 1.3% I was mentioning, you have to spread it over that period. The second component is whether we can get

Finance committee  Not this year, I think.

Finance committee  That's a very good question, and part of the reason there's so much contradiction in terms of the forecasts is that role. It's very hard to measure what the role of confidence is. And confidence has been very much at play, in terms of this cycle, starting with the U.S. economy, o

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here to share with you our view of the budget. I should say that I am very much the numbers guy at the Conference Board. We put together an economic forecast, and I'm the person behind that. We are look