The Stimulus Stopped The Recession – We NEED MORE STIMULUS!

The issue of whether the stimulus package worked or not is really not up for debate or to be decided by a poll of Americans. It clearly worked at stopping the recession and limiting the damage that was about to happen to our economy. I know people on the right, mostly, but some haters on the left too, will try to confuse the issue with how many jobs were created. NOT ENOUGH for sure, but according to Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist and former adviser to John McCain, it clearly had a huge impact and he had this to say in response to Boehner “The Orange”…

Joining the backlash against House Minority leader John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) economic speech yesterday, Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, said Boehner was “just wrong” to call the $787 billion stimulus spending “a failure.”

If there was no stimulus at all, Zandi said, unemployment would be at around 11.5% rather than 9.5%.

“I think if we had not had the stimulus, estimates put forward by the Congressional Budget Office are absolutely right: we’d have 2.5-3 million fewer jobs than we’d have today,” he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing this morning.

What needs to change are people’s expectations, he said. “The stimulus did exactly what it was intended to do. It was intended to end the recession, jump-start the economy, and it did that,” said Zandi, who has advised both Obama and John McCain in the past.

Here is a link to a story on what I call the Fuckington Post, Hat Tip to Staci, where they show you projects that were funded by the stimulus and asks the question below in bold…

On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the act added from 1.4 million to 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010.

In addition to $288 billion in tax cuts, the Recovery Act funded all sorts of worthy projects that created jobs, backstopped a number of safety-net programs, and made huge investments in infrastructure, energy independence, mass transit and other public goods.

Here are 11 projects that got stimulus money. Do you think they deserved your tax money?

With the economy apparently slowing down because of the winding down of the stimulus, we democrats have to join together and start helping the President create a ground swell for more stimulus. We can’t just sit back and expect him to do it without our help, we have to be vocal about it. We have to push hard and I would also add that as long as the “professional left” keeps up their doom and gloom blogging and chipping away at Obama’s popularity, they are helping the Republicans stop any more stimulus.

I would also add that if the corporate Republicans would get up off some of those record profits and invest in American jobs like the patriots they claim to be, we might not need the government to come to the rescue again. But since the Republicans have made a conscious effort to stop ANYTHING President Obama does for their own political gain, we don’t have many choices.

WPA 2010 – Saving American Jobs

Go read this piece by Steve Benen, he sums it all up better than anyone, as usual. Here is just a snippet…

And finally, by way of a reminder as to how truly nonsensical our politics can be, also note that the economy could use another boost to prevent it from slipping even further backwards. The CBO makes abundantly clear that the stimulus worked in generating growth and creating jobs. So, does that mean we’ll get another stimulus to generate more growth and create more jobs? Of course not — Republicans choose not to believe the data, want less of what worked, and won’t allow a vote on the most effective elements of the policy. Voters say they want less spending — even though more spending would improve the economy — and congressional Democrats are unlikely to even try to push for more recovery efforts, fearing a public backlash against sound policies that work.

The stimulus worked, and we need more. The country is convinced it failed, and demands less.