OK, I don’t know why I haven’t done this before.

When you’re trying to track federal fiscal policy, a pretty good first cut is to focus on discretionary spending. For one thing, it is in fact the thing that has been moving a lot in recent years. Also, focusing on discretionary helps take out of the picture both spending rises driven by automatic stabilizers — like the slump-induced rise in unemployment benefits and food stamps — and spending driven by things like demography, as baby boomers hit retirement age.

So here’s federal discretionary spending since the 2007 business cycle peak, compared with spending after the 2000 peak:

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If spending had tracked what happened under Bush II, discretionary spending would be about a third — or more than 2 percent of GDP — higher. Since there is good reason to believe that the multiplier is 1.5 or more, this would mean real GDP 3-plus percent higher, closing much if not most of the output gap, and probably an unemployment rate below 5.5 percent. In short, we would have had a vastly healthier economy but for the de facto victory of disastrous austerity policies.