Questions that are rarely asked

If the multiplier is 1.4, recovery should have been accelerating pretty rapidly, right? Right? Bueller?

That is me on Twitter.  I am not sure what is the right way to think about the appropriate counterfactual here, but the explanation of “growth has not much accelerated because some other pending catastrophe was in the works” does not seem correct to me.

You can cite various reasons for economic slowness (“they cut state and local spending,” etc.), but the point of course is to explain the second derivative and then make that consistent with a multiplier estimate.  Or is it that government spending is supposed to have a higher multiplier than private economic activity?  Bueller?