Today is the fifth anniversary of the day President Obama signing the "stimulus," the American Recovery Act.
In December I published this post," Did The Stimulus Work? See For Yourself." On this anniversary occasion, we republish it, in full:
Did the "stimulus" work? Republicans claim it was a failure, a waste of money, and was the reason the deficit soared. So let's see what happened. And I do mean "see."
(Actually, the deficit soared in Bush's last budget year -- all the way to $1.4 trillion! The stimulus kicked in after that. And now the deficit is down by more than half from where Bush left it. But hey, apparently repetition of lies is better than knowledge of facts...)
Anyway ... did the stimulus work? See for yourself:
The very left side of this chart shows the last few months of the Bush administration. Those lines going down and down and down show job losses. By the time Bush left we were losing over 800,000 jobs per month.
Then the stimulus kicked in. See how the lines start going up and up and up? After a year the country was gaining jobs again, and has been ever since.
The stimulus worked, but it was not enough.
