The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - did it work? What did it do?

[Riot]

Fascinating reading. This is a very well-written, detailed, multi-page, in-depth objective article examining performance aspects of the stimulus package put together by Bush-Obama team and passed by Obama as soon as he got into office January 2009.

It addresses all the claims made against the stimulus in a detailed and factual manner: where did the money go, Solyndra, tax benefits, etc.

The "stimulus" formal name was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

If you never really understood what the complicated stimulus was, or how it worked, or what it covered; if economic policy makes your eyes glaze over in boredom, then this will explain it all for you.

(The stimulus is different than "TARP", or Trouble Asset Relief Program, the freebie bank bailout handout given by George W. Bush at the end of his term)

Opening excerpt:

Think Again: Obama's New Deal
The president's Republican critics are dead wrong. The stimulus worked.
BY MICHAEL GRUNWALD | SEPT/OCT 2012

"Obama's Stimulus Package Was an Epic Failure
That Haunted His Presidency."

No. U.S. President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill was certainly a political failure. Obama signed it during his first month in office, cutting taxes for more than 95 percent of American workers, while pouring cash into health care, education, energy, infrastructure, and aid to victims of the Great Recession.

It was textbook Keynesian economics, using public dollars to revive private demand, but within a year, the percentage of those who thought it had created jobs was lower than the percentage of Americans who believe Elvis is alive.

Republicans mocked it as "Porkulus," a bloated encapsulation of everything wrong with the Obama regime, and it helped launch their Tea Party-fueled political revival.

The media breathlessly chronicled its silly expenditures, like costumes for water-safety mascots; silly-sounding legitimate expenditures, like a brain-chemistry study of cocaine-addicted monkeys; and fictitious expenditures, like levitating trains to Disneyland.

Democrats got so weary of the nonstop ridicule that they stopped using the word "stimulus."

Nearly four years later, Obama's economic recovery bill -- and the tepid economic recovery that followed it -- is at the heart of the debate over his campaign for a second term.

To his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, the stimulus was a big-government boondoggle that blew up the national debt without putting Americans back to work, a profligate exercise in tax-and-spend liberalism, crony capitalism, and airy-fairy green utopianism.

Obama doesn't use the s-word today, but he does argue that the bill, formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, saved the country from a second Great Depression, ending an economic nightmare in the short term (the Recovery part) while laying the groundwork for a more competitive and sustainable economy in the long term (the Reinvestment part).

Meanwhile, disgruntled liberals complain that the stimulus was far too small, because Obama was far too timid, and that jobless Americans are still paying the price for the president's spinelessness.

When it comes to the Recovery Act, the facts are on Obama's side.

For starters, there is voluminous evidence that the stimulus did provide real stimulus, helping to stop a terrifying free-fall, avert a second Depression, and end a brutal recession.

America's top economic forecasters -- Macroeconomic Advisers, Moody's Economy.com, IHS Global Insight, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the Congressional Budget Office -- agree that it increased GDP at least 2 percentage points, the difference between contraction and growth, and saved or created about 2.5 million jobs.

Continued:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...vkPYPJ.twitter

Other addressed questions:

"But Obama Promised to Keep Unemployment
Below 8%!"

"The Stimulus Should Have Been Bigger,
But Obama Wimped Out."

"Unlike the New Deal, Obama's Stimulus Won't
Leave a Lasting Legacy."

"The Stimulus Was Riddled with Fraud, Pork, and Solyndra-Style Boondoggles."

"The Stimulus Shows What Obama Is All About."

[Thepaindispenser]

Hahahahaha, nice try Riot, if you count discouraged people who have stopped looking jobs unemployment is over 11%. Show me one government stimules in the history that has ever worked? Hoover and FDR's massive government spending helped prolong the Depression. Obama's stimules helped saved the jobs of his public sector union bribers, who really just needed to pay much more for their pensions and healthcare, and funded a bunch of liberal projects that previously were never able to get through Congress. By the way where do you think that money came from? I am guessing you don't have kids because it seems like you have no problem borrowing today to fund a bunch of corrupt Democrats and having future generations' with a much worse quality of life footing the bill.