Conservative
Type 40
The CBO says the stimulus worked, it jsut needed to more stimuls and less tax cuts for the wealthy.
Why did the tax cuts in it NOT do what the republicans claimed they woudldo when they INSISTED on them in the package?
According to the CBO, the stimulus may have added 3.3 million jobs. In its most recent quarterly appraisal of the stimulus act, the CBO said the stimulus lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points during the quarter ending in June, decreasing the number of unemployed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.
Unfortunately, like every mass released bit of news, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Let's take a deeper look into the CBO's estimates and the basis for their conclusions.
The best place to start is right at the CBO itself. On March 8, 2010 CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf spoke at a conference to the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) regarding, among other things, the impact of the stimulus law on the economy. During the session, Elmendorf stated specifically that his team’s estimates do not measure real-world outputs (just inputs), that they do not serve as an independent check on its success or failure, and that if the stimulus had not created jobs the CBO's figures would not reflect that fact.
See, the CBO doesn’t actually count jobs created. Instead, it uses models that assume putting taxpayer money into the system results in additional demand, additional spending, and, ergo, additional jobs. Even before the stimulus passed, the CBO used these same models to predict that the stimulus would create jobs. And now it’s using those same models to estimate that it has created jobs. Ever heard of circular reasoning? But because the CBO relies on slightly updated versions of the same, original models throughout the process, it wouldn’t necessarily detect the fact that the stimulus didn’t work.
Horrors! The Economic Stimulus Program Did Not Work, Says The New York Times and Congressional Budget office
Horrors! Two significant entities have recently reached the same conclusion that the economic stimulus package did not work as it was supposed to to, falling far short of its goals and predictions. The first entity is the New York Times, which reviewed the dire economic status of the country two days ago:
- Annual economic growth is only at 1.8%, far below the 3.1% of last year and below a growth rate of a healthy, growing economy.
- Consumer spending is slowing down, a traditional driver of a robust economy.
- Wages are stagnant and higher prices for food and fuel are straining family budgets.
- Falling home equity values are contributing to downward pressure on consumer confidence and when consumers are not confident, they tend to restrict their spending.
- State and local government budgets are a fiscal mess.
So... essentially... as always... TM is full of shit.
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