Stimulus: One Year Later
Some say it was too modest, others feel it was about $800 billion overboard. In any event, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a year old, and, according to ProPublica, still has a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of stimulation left in the tank.
Check out ProPublica’s mega-stimulus coverage page, which has handy tools for monitoring stimulus spending.
Wait, before you go…ProPublica:
The White House is marking today’s anniversary with a stimulus progress report [2] (PDF), which claims the Recovery Act has created or saved 2 million jobs; extended unemployment benefits for almost 20 million Americans; and cut taxes for more than 95 percent of working families. The administration says that by the end of last month, the combination of tax cuts and obligated funds came to a total of $453 billion.
“The work that you set us out to do a year ago is going well,” Vice President Joe Biden writes in his cover letter to the president. “I believe that we have served the American people well.”
You won’t be surprised to hear that Republicans feel differently. House GOP Leader John Boehner of Ohio issued a statement [3] yesterday describing the White House’s depiction of the stimulus’s achievements as “hopelessly out of touch with reality.” The statement doesn’t challenge any of the actual figures in the administration’s report. Instead, it criticizes the White House for changing its metric for calculating the number of jobs created or saved; points to the “debt piled on the backs of our kids and grandkids;” and calls the overall performance of the stimulus “dismal.”
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