Last week marked the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill that was touted as the economy’s quick fix.
But in its first year of the two-year spending deployment, how has it fared?
There is no doubt that steps needed to be taken to avert economic disaster in the economy in February 2009 following Barack Obama’s inauguration, and the White House will claim that it did exactly that.
When the bill was signed into law, many critics claimed that the plan to disburse the spending over two years was too slow considering the dire straights the economy was in.
One year in, a good majority of the spending has been pumped into the economy and unemployment is still sitting just under 10 percent, which translates into millions of Americans still out of work.
Economists estimate that over the course of the recession 8.5 million Americans lost their jobs.
The White House says that the stimulus bill has created or saved 2 million jobs in the economy thus far.
This is hard to measure because there is no way to know how many workers truly would have been laid off had it not been for the stimulus bill, but the White House estimates that 364,000 jobs in manufacturing, 262,000 jobs in construction and 63,000 “green” jobs have been created or saved by the stimulus bill.
Many economists do attribute the rise from recession in the third quarter of 2009 to the immense amount of government spending.
Both the third and fourth quarters of 2009 saw positive GDP signaling the end of the recession.
Economists disagree, however, wondering if this will be sustainable after the stimulus money fades.
The truth of the matter is that the stimulus package probably was responsible for the bump in GDP, pulling the nation out of recession,.However, it was only able to cushion the fall of the economy, not really making a dent in the unemployment situation.
In reality, the U.S. economy is far too large, and the problems facing it when the stimulus was passed were far too complex for a one-time spending spree to fix the economy.
Obama and company have recently started somewhat of a political offense in regard to the stimulus bill, attacking its critics and trying to convince a skeptical America of the bill’s success—A recent Gallop poll showed that only six percent of Americans believed the bill had been successful in creating jobs.
Obama is working to convince the public that the bill turned an assured mega-disaster into something much smaller.
The bill couldn’t stop the luxury car that is the U.S. economy from wrecking, but it did serve as an airbag.
