The economy would have been in much worse shape without the 2009 stimulus which increased employment in the third quarter of this year by as many as 3.3 million full-time jobs, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office.
Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates have blasted the $800 billion pumped into the economy through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a waste of taxpayer dollars that failed to put people back to work.
The nonpartisan CBO figures offer a more nuanced picture of how government spending impacted an economy still coping with unemployment above 9 percent. It provides an alternative glimpse of an economy with even higher unemployment and drastically lower growth.
The CBO figures released Tuesday estimate that the stimulus package raised the gross domestic product this past quarter by 0.3 percent-1.9 percent.
The CBO report provided a broad range of the estimated number of full-time jobs created because of the stimulus from a low of 500,000 to a high of 3.3 million jobs.
Previous estimates indicated that the stimulus funded more than 400,000 full-time jobs in the third quarter, but the CBO said in its report that the figure was not a comprehensive look at the laws impact.
The effects of the stimulus are fading after having peaked in the first half of 2010, the report noted.
However, the CBO estimates that the stimulus will raise GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.8 percent next year and employment by 200,000 to 1.1 million jobs.
500k - 3.3 million seems like an awful wide range to me. It sounds like they may not be all that confident about what they're doing.
CBO: Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs - Josh Boak - POLITICO.com