There They Go Again: Two Senators Continue False and Misleading Attacks on Recovery Act

[JohnWxy]

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/03/there-they-go-again-two-senators-continue-false-and-misleading-attacks-recovery-act

This morning two senators—John McCain and Tom Coburn—released their third report critiquing 100 Recovery Act projects. And just like the last two, this one was an inaccurate and misleading attack on programs that are putting Americans to work across the nation. I’ll present some details in a moment, but it’s very unfortunate that, once again, instead of trying to help create the conditions for stronger growth, to help build on the momentum of the Recovery Act, McCain and Coburn spend their valuable time cooking up phony critiques and, with their Republican colleagues, blocking votes of even bipartisan measures to help small businesses.

Let’s start with the bigger picture. Just last week two prominent, independent economists released a (How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End) on how actions by the government (and the Federal Reserve), including the Recovery Act, helped to end the Great Recession. One of the authors—Mark Zandi—was one of McCain’s top advisers during his presidential bid. He and Alan Blinder (a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve) found that the Recovery Act has created or saved about 2.7 million jobs so far, and shaved about a point and a half off of the unemployment rate.

These jobs are the result of over 70,000 projects in action around the country, of grants to states supporting jobs of teachers, police, and firefighters, of tax cuts for working households, loans to small businesses, and investments in innovative new industries producing advanced batteries, clean energy, and much more. They’ve helped reverse a situation where last year, we were losing millions of private sector jobs; in the first half of this year, we’ve added 593,000 private sector jobs.

Now, we’re always glad to take a second look at projects when concerns are raised. In fact, there’s never been a stimulus program of this magnitude with anywhere near the amount of oversight that’s been brought to bear on the Recovery Act. And when we find a problem, we fix it. We’ve shut down hundreds of projects that weren’t delivering the goods.

But the inaccuracy of McCain/Coburn in this regard renders this report just as unreliable as the last two. We followed up the projects in those reports, and found half of their claims to be flat-out false or misleading. Many of the others criticized worthwhile, job-creating projects. Check out this and you’ll see that news outlets like CNN have debunked their claims in the past, often by simply going to the folks who were working on the project and learning about it:
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