Judging Stimulus by Job Data Reveals Success

Source: New York Times

Judging Stimulus by Job Data Reveals Success

Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.

Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.

If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?

Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren’t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html?hp

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http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/recoveryanniversary/

The advantage that the reactionary right wing has on this is that nobody knows how much worse it would have been had they been making decisions instead.

that has seen the net loss of MILLIONS of jobs.

It's like obsessively picking at a scab to prove that it's "healed".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/06/job-loss-chart-what-36-mi_n_164828.html

There are possible options for "direr" and "direst" as it were.

The stimulus plan did indeed work in that all competent analysis shows the situation would have been worse without it.

Your leg is still broken and painful when the bone is reset and a cast is on.

But is it better or worse than leaving a bone sticking out of your skin and an open wound?

Would you not say the process of resetting the bone and applying the cast worked as intended even thiough your bone has not knitted back together yet and still hurts?

The question is 2011 when the money dries up and all these wonderful jobs "created" suddenly have no funding.

Unless economic growth kicks in, to create the jobs to replace these and than some, 2.5 million new unemployed persons in 2011.

It was a band aid on a shot gun blast.

is another year of employment better or worse than not having that extra year?

Surviving for one year seems a little silly does it not.

You can do this, you just better have a damn good plan when that one year of borrowed time runs out.

This is like buying groceries on your credit card. It might have been cheaper to pay unemployment benefits and start a trade war with china.

"feeling Good", "winning", and "Political Victory" are more important than "facing reality".

Get With the Program, Wilya? :)

"It's like obsessively picking at the scab on an amputation to prove that it's healed."

Geithner could have suggested and influenced the President in such a way that more of the money would go directly to the states.

And not just to projects created to get more stimulus money - but to keeping the people that were employed in January 2009 at their desks or in the field. My County didn't receive one single penny of stimulus money, so our teachers, teacher aides, librarians and others are being pink slipped.

For instance, when Geithner received Schwartzennegger's request for a LOAN of 20 Billion bucks, he refused the loan.

Why? The thirty million people who live in California will have to pay HOW MUCH to make good the thirteen to fourteen trillion that Bernanke and Geithner have leaked to their buddies on Wall Street?

But we cannot be loaned anything? How corrupt is that?

from Ford. They don't look at the big picture they only see what is happening in their back yard. And it isn't just those in Michigan that close their eyes to everything out side of their region. Wow job growth has went up big deal I'm still out of work or about to be laid off so it isn't working. That is what Obama is up against.

:rofl:

on pink paper, no less.

There is no recovery, there are no jobs, there was no saving of anything, just looting by the banks, which continues to this minute, and beyond. Got it?

This country has become the Ultimate Reality Show.

What President Obama is up against? How about this, the nation has seen 10 million payroll jobs evaporate in a 2 year period that doesn't even figure the numbers of non-payroll jobs that went up in smoke.

Voters in Pennsylvania don't give a fuck if people in other regions are employed when they vote, and they shouldn't.

What a bargain.

Most of this was funding of existing State programs. Almost every state in the Union is experiencing some sort of budget issues.

When the stimulus expires, and the states do not have the revenue they had pre-crisis the lay offs will occur.

Is that no one is ever happy with anything. Even the Dems on this blog can't reach common ground. Our Congress, the Senate in particular, is just this way and that doesn't even count the Repugs. The differences between the Blue Dicks and the Progessives is so vast it's crippling in itself.

Broken Government. Too many unbridgeable differences in the people. Took a couple hundred years, but it's going down the toilet.

When one boss that I had invested money in a business, she was happy if she got enough out of it to live on. She was single, retired, house paid off.

That she put well over $3 million in the business was immaterial. That she was making a bit less than 1% interest on a risky enterprise when the standard interest rates on money market accounts was over 3% eluded her. "Opportunity cost" wasn't a word or concept she knew.

If you have an investment, you don't compare the rate of return against what you get from putting the money in a coffee can and burying it. You compare it with reasonably secure rate of returns, rates of returns for things with similar kinds of risks.

Whenever you see an analysis that ignores opportunity costs you know you're looking at half an analysis. In this case, it's easy: The actual benefits of the stimulus are "likely bill" versus "actual bill". The problem is that nobody knows what would have been done had the second stimulus bill for this recession not been passed in 2/09. However, it's a sure bet something would have been passed, for all the politicking that nobody else had any ideas or plan. That probably would have had some positive effect. It's just nobody knows the details of what that would have been. The results may have been better or worse, or the same for less money. In hindsight, everybody can say what would have been: Some say nothing at all would have been passed (which is unlikely, IMO), some say that what would have been passed would have been much better. No way of knowing. Too many people didn't want to hear, didn't care to hear, and were too busy getting a bill passed so that the money could be spent a year later to wait a few weeks and find out.

But it's still important to recognize that the analysis in the OP is half an analysis.

After all, he proposed creating 1 million jobs with a bill a few months ago. Oh wait, that didn't materialize either, just like everything else he proposed.

Like that piece of shit Eric Cantor. He, in his district, said the stimulus would add jobs in his district. Then in Washington said it adds no jobs. He is worse than the too tan man. I can't stand Cantor's little reptilian face and douche baggery.