Stimulus News

No, The Stimulus Didn’t Destroy More Jobs Than It Created

1:40 pm EST May 17th, 2011 | Conservative | 5 Comments

Fox News is pushing an academic paper making the claim, but guess what?

What?

It isn’t true.

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Catching Up With Glenn Reynolds: Stimulus Edition

2:53 pm EST March 22nd, 2011 | Conservative | 59 Comments

In the course of some other work, I ran across this March 2, 2009 post from Instapundit (aka Glenn Reynolds) who used the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s closing on that date to render a (negative) verdict on the Stimulus bill. His exact words: “Looks like a vote of ‘no confidence’ to me.”

So I decided to chart the Dow from the date of the stimulus passing (around Feb. 20, 2009) to date.

In case you aren’t clear, that is a 4,167 point increase – 53%.

By comparison – the Dow during the presidency that Reynolds supported – George W. Bush (down 21%):

And here’s the Dow so far for Obama:

And just because it’s fun, the Dow during Clinton’s presidency:

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Oh Memories

2:00 am EST January 29th, 2009 | News | 1 Comment

Republican response to the Democratic president’s budget proposal.

Now, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress heard the message you sent us last November. You wanted us to cut spending first — and we had a plan to do just that. It was a good plan. We tried to eliminate the President’s requested tax increases. We tried to make real cuts in Government spending. But, unfortunately, the President and the liberal Democrats in Congress defeated all of these proposals.

The third question you should ask is, does the President’s plan help put Americans back to work? And the answer is, no — N.O. — No.

That was the Republican response… in 1993. The bill later passed without any Republican support, just like how President Obama’s economic stimulus passed without Republican support in the House (my guess is a few Senate Republicans might peel off, though we’ve got the votes for passage anyhow).

Under President Clinton we had one of the largest and longest peacetime expansions of the U.S. economy in history. So, theres that precedent.

I don’t have a crystal ball to say where the economy will be, though I think under President Obama’s leadership we’ll find our way out of the hole dug by the previous occupant, but one thing I know for sure is that the right is peddling the same bull they’re always peddling.

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Somebody Tell John McCain He Lost The Election

2:52 pm EST January 25th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 38 Comments

McCain wants a rewrite of the stimulus bill? Off the top of my head I can think of 69 million reasons why John McCain doesn’t get a rewrite of the stimulus bill.

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GOP Made Up CBO Report On Stimulus To Try And Derail It

10:10 pm EST January 23rd, 2009 | Republicans | 29 Comments

New president, same old GOP dirty tricks. Their flaw, as usual, is that somebody checked. When the last elephant is put down it’ll yelp, “Somebody checked!!’

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

‘We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,’ a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

The CBO numbers were given to a small number of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but were not posted online because they’re not an official CBO product. (Media outlets, while reporting widely about the ‘report,’ have declined to post it online. Here’s the whole thing.) Democratic aides say they are certain that the GOP leaked it to the Associated Press in order to undercut the spending portion of the stimulus.

I recently was talking to a friend of mine who worked on the Obama campaign and we were discussing why the GOP had no ThinkProgress or similar type site of their own. My friend reminded me that ThinkProgress deals with actual, verifiable facts.

Oh, right.

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