Fancy that. The stimulus actually stimulated the economy. The CBO reports:
– They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent,
– Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.8 percentage points and 2.0 percentage points,
– Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million, and,
– Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 5.2 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise (see Table 1). (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers).
Four of many reasons why it was hilarious to hear Republican tea party candidates demonizing "stimulus" as somehow awful and un-American. I wish a Democratic candidate somewhere would have asked, "Here's what the stimulus did. [List above] Why are you against this?" Then again, they'd probably accuse the Democrats of using "liberal math."