Non Partisan Independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Confirms Positive Impact on Jobs and Economic Growth of Stimulus

Note:  This Will Not Prevent Republicans From Calling Stimulus a Failure – Nothing Would

When the Congress passed the President’s Stimulus package in 2009 it wanted someone to check and see if the program was successful.  So they required the Congressional Budget Office to report to Congress on just how much or how little economic benefit came from the program.  Here is the latest report.http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/125xx/doc12564/11-22-ARRA.pdf

On that basis, CBO estimates that ARRA’s

policies had the following effects in the third quarter

of calendar year 2011 compared with what would have

occurred otherwise:

 They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic

product (GDP) by between 0.3 percent and

1.9 percent (see Table 1),

 They lowered the unemployment rate by between

0.2 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points,

 They increased the number of people employed by

between 0.4 million and 2.4 million, and

 They increased the number of full-time-equivalent

jobs by 0.5 million to 3.3 million. (Increases in FTE

jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or

overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in

the number of employed workers.)

Wow, pretty powerful stuff.  Now if you are a Republican and faced with this data you could do one of two things.  You could accept the fact that the Stimulus worked, or you could lie about the facts and data and say the Stimulus completely failed and did not create a single job.  Hm, which choice do we think the Republicans will make?