The Stimulus Worked

Posted on 11/28/2010 at 8:49 am by Bob Cesca

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.”

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  • Susan

    What’s frustrating is that I DID hear Dems talk about what the stimulus did. About the good things that health care bill was doing. Unfortunately, they were shouting into the wind. I seldom saw any of their comments on the nightly news, but I sure saw Palin, McCain and Boehner spewing their distortions.

  • http://www.politicalruminations.com/ Nicole473

    Democrats need to work on our messaging machine. We can not hope to compete when we have to contend with Fox News spewing bullshit 24/7.We need someone to buy a network and shamelessly promote Democrats. Just like Fox.While this is repugnant to us in that media is supposed to present an unbiased view, the alternative is unacceptable in that we are not even going to be in the game, much less win it.

  • Luke B

    Bob, you nailed it at then end. They would just claim it’s liberal math. I have recited so many statistics and CBO reports to wingnuts, and they have the amazing ability to discredit anything they don’t agree with. So frustrating… But all of us are all too familiar with this standard Republican justification tactic.