"Not your father's stimulus"

Megan McArdle's take on Arnold Kling's look at things:

Another structural issue that I have discussed in previous lectures is the nature of the unemployment that exists. The standard recession of the post-war United States found the economy with excess inventories of durable goods, and most of the unemployed were production workers temporarily laid off from manufacturing facilities. More recently, it seems to me that a lot of our imbalances are structural. In financial services, most of the people who are leaving jobs related to mortgage origination and securitization are not coming back. In autos, some of the decline in production is cyclical, but worldwide there is too much capacity in the industry, so that many unemployed auto workers are also not coming back.

I doubt that I would want to apply the same multiplier analysis to structural unemployment that I would to cyclical unemployment. To my knowledge, neither the old-fashioned macro engineers nor the modern academics have addressed this issue.