The idea that George W. Bush “kept us safe” has rightly been exposed to ridicule recently by Donald Trump. But Bush also failed miserably on another front: keeping us safe economically, as he presided over the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression — and his presidency was already an economic disaster before that, per Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

On this second front, the GOP blame-shifting centers on Obama, in order to virtually erase the epic market failure from history. Just as Bush is supposed to get a pass for 9/11, while getting credit for “keeping us safe” afterwards, he’s also given a pass for the housing bubble and the financial crisis which gave us the Great Recession, so that all blame can be focused on Obama, who supposedly made things worse with his “job-killing” policies.

In the real world, empirically-based economists know this is ridiculous. In the third quarter of 2010, for example, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the stimulus bill “increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million.” This was typical of CBO reporting of the impact the stimulus had, but the totality of policy responses was much broader than that, and a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities by economists Alan Binder of Princeton and Mark Zandi of Moody Analytics updates their earlier work in 2010 to first provide a comprehensive overview and then draw lessons for the future.

More: Paul Krugman Has Taught Them Nothing: Republicans Would Tank the Economy Again, Given Another Chance