re: #99 engineer dog

I think the real reason that people don’t think the stimulus worked is because the expectations of what it would do, and what happened, didn’t match.

Turns out the recession was far deeper than anyone believed, which meant that the effects of the stimulus as a job creator were muted.

It kept things from getting even worse than they were. The stimulus also included billions in transfer payments to states to keep the states from having to engage in massive cuts - to tide them over until their revenues improved or they made sufficient structural changes to their budgets.

The Administration focused on jobs saved or created as a metric, which was an attempt to catalog the effect of keeping people in jobs through those kinds of transfer payments, but the visual that everyone focuses on is the U3 or U6 unemployment rates, which kept climbing despite the stimulus.

The GOP conclusion is that the stimulus failed, and that the only solution is to cut taxes and cut spending even more. All they have to do is point to the unemployment rates to bolster their argument. And that’s one that has traction.

Democrats have the more difficult task of trying to make this about job creation but focusing on the Party of No (the GOP) is perhaps the only thing that will save the day for them.