Did the Stimulus Create Jobs? YES - Democratic Underground

USArmyParatrooper

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Thu Sep-30-10 07:38 PM
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Did the Stimulus Create Jobs? YES

President Obama, who is "just not into" the middle class say a few - has an entire laundry list of legislative victories that help the middle class. We can talk about help with student loans, the first-time homebuyer tax credit, ending credit card predatory practices, middle class tax cuts, health care reform, unprecedented investments in green jobs, - and on and on. I can add many more to the list but for now I'm going to focus on jobs.

When Obama took office the great financial crisis (yes CRISIS is not an understatement) was still in its genesis and job losses were at 750,000 per month.

And now....

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/27/timothy-geithner/geithner-claims-us-had-six-months-positive-job-gro/

""We've seen six months of positive job growth by the private sector."

And mind you, we're still in positive private sector job growth. (The Census jobs skewed the numbers on the positive and negative side in different months).

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2010/0903/Unemployment-rate-up-to-9.6-percent-but-private-sector-gains-jobs

Private employers added 67,000 jobs in August. But the unemployment rate ticked up from the July figure of 9.5 percent – in part because more people came back into the labor force to look for work.

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=recession">On technical merit the recession was officially over a year ago. Unfortunately the unemployment rate is always the last number to improve when recessions end and recovery begins. But think about where the country was headed and where we are now. We were facing our entire financial system and our auto industry on the brink of total collapse. Job losses were snowballing month after month and totaled three quarters of a million lost per month when President Obama took over.

And while there are legitimate concerns about the pace of the recovery, the fact that we're already talking about the pace of the recovery is simply amazing.

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/09/did-the-stimulus-create-jobs/

Did the Stimulus Create Jobs?

Yes, the stimulus legislation increased employment, despite false Republican claims to the contrary.

September 27, 2010
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Summary

The economic stimulus package is a favorite target of Republican candidates and groups, but more than a few ads falsely claim it did not create or save any jobs. Some recent examples:

* Republican House candidate Dan Debicella charges that Democratic Rep. Jim Himes failed Connecticut’s families because he voted for a "stimulus package that has done nothing to reduce unemployment."
* Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor in Florida, says Democrat Alex Sink "backed the failed stimulus bill, which created debt, not jobs."
* Similarly, Sink — who never served in Congress and didn’t vote on the bill — is attacked by the Republican Party of Florida in an ad that says the stimulus "gave us big debt and no jobs."
* Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group that does not have to disclose its donors, aired an ad against Democratic congressional candidate Denny Heck of Washington that claimed the "$787 billion stimulus … failed to save and create jobs." The group has launched similar ads against other Democrats.
* Kristi Noem, a Republican House candidate from South Dakota, calls the measure a "jobless stimulus."

The truth is that the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people, compared with what employment would have been otherwise. That’s according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Analysis

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more commonly known as the stimulus bill, has been featured in more than 130 TV ads this year, according to a database maintained by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. In many of those ads, Republicans claim the bill has "failed" (a matter of opinion) or state (correctly) that unemployment has gone up since President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Feb. 17, 2009. The national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February 2009, and it now stands at 9.6 percent, having peaked at 10.1 percent in October 2009.

But it’s just false to say that the stimulus created "no jobs" or "failed to save and create jobs" or "has done nothing to reduce unemployment" – or similar claims that the stimulus did not produce any jobs.

As we have written before, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has "owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points" and "ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million."

Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill. The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there’s no doubt that the number is positive.

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