Fox chyron asks: "Would a 2nd stimulus do more harm than good to economy?"

Oh, stop with the concern trolling.

Real economists have NO fears that stimulus spending would be bad for the economy. And that spending wouldn't be responsible for the nonsense being pushed by the rightwing media about tax increases!

If the problem is that businesses and the wealthy have been misled, the solution isn't to cave in to that disinformation campaign!

The return to previous tax rates is entirely due to Bush's bad tax cuts in the first place. A second stimulus would REPLACE that spending that the wealthy and many businesses SHOULD be and COULD be doing right now! If they were spending, instead of trying to punish/hamper Obama, we wouldn't NEED that second stimulus.

To spend more money now would probably escalate the recovery, but I think for the long term it would not be a good idea as it will only lead to more pessimism over future tax increases.

So because certain people have ungrounded, unjustified fears about their taxes going up, we shouldn't escalate the recovery by doing things which you admit will work.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense...

"it will only lead to more pessimism over future tax increases" -- fortunately for us, the super rich are sitting on a humongous, unfathomably huge pile of money in Scrooge McDuck style. We can raise taxes on them extremely high before it affects their way of life in the tiniest way.

(Don't doubt that I love and cherish the super rich. I don't want them to experience any discomfort at all, even if it makes the country better. But huge tax hikes on them won't cause them any discomfort.)

You should understand the thinking of the rich; any taxes are too much. As attributed to Leona Helmsley: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes". My previous father-in-law was worth mid-eight figures with ownership of several companies. He would get together with his primary friends and compete over how many taxes they avoided paying with "tricks". This was the standard topic of conversation at the weekly club get together. When he wanted to buy a very expensive automobile with a sizable tax bill, he instead became a dealer and purchased a requisite set of demo vehicles including a limousine version. He never really attempted to make a sale and wrote the whole thing off as a failed business. He would even chide me over the taxes I was paying on around $100k earnings. More often than not his tax burden was less than mine despite earning more than 30+ times more. He would regularly spend $40k to avoid paying $10k in taxes of any form. The highest paid employee was a tax attorney. My point is – they don't want to give back, not even at gunpoint. Of course there are exceptions to the people with wealth that I have observed but most strive to pay no taxes and will go to extremes to achieve that goal.