I have a plan to get the economy going again — click our heels together three times.
Look, the economy will eventually get better. People will claim that whatever policies are adopted are responsible for that recovery regardless of whether those policies had any effects and even if they were harmful. We’ll never be able to sort out the causal relationships.
Did the New Deal bring us out of the Depression? Many economists doubt it, but decades of Democratic dominance in American politics were built on that claim. Times were awful, the New Deal involved a lot of activity, and eventually the economy got better. But if the New Deal didn’t deserve any of the credit or was actually harmful, then giving it credit led to decades of faulty policy prescriptions.
I fear we are about to make the same mistake. Before all is said and done we will spend trillions on various schemes and eventually the economy will get better. Are we going to wrongly credit the huge government spending?
That’s why I say that I am going to click my heels together three times to fix the problem. When things eventually get better I am going to claim that heel-clicking really did the “magic” of the recovery. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
And if things don’t get better soon enough I am going to say that I didn’t click heels enough. It should have been six times.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
You’re doing something wrong Jay, the Dow is down 332 points. Let me give it a try…ok, done! I just clicked mine three times. From here on out I’ll take credit for any success. (Time clicked: 3:09 pm CST, Jan 20, 2009, Dow = 7,949).
Oh, I hadn’t clicked my heels this morning. I was planning to do it later, but I’m glad you’ve gotten it started.