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The liberal media with it's facts and hocus pocus science.
The truth is trickling out despite the wing-nut spin...
Judging Stimulus by Job Data Reveals Success
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: February 16, 2010
WASHINGTON
NY TimesLet’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.
If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?
Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren’t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.
Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.
*snip*
In the early months of last year, spending by state and local governments was falling rapidly, as was tax revenue. In the spring, tax revenue continued to drop, yet spending jumped — during the very time when state and local officials were finding out roughly how much stimulus money they would be receiving. This is the money that has kept teachers, police officers, health care workers and firefighters employed.
Then there is corporate spending. It surged in the final months of last year. Mark Zandi of Economy.com (who has advised the McCain campaign and Congressional Democrats) says that the Dec. 31 expiration of a tax credit for corporate investment, which was part of the stimulus, is a big reason.
The story isn’t quite as clear-cut with consumer spending, as skeptics note. Its sharp plunge stopped before President Obama signed the stimulus into law exactly one year ago. But the billions of dollars in tax cuts, food stamps and jobless benefits in the stimulus have still made a difference. Since February, aggregate wages and salaries have fallen, while consumer spending has risen. The difference between the two — some $100 billion — has essentially come from stimulus checks.
The second argument in the bill’s favor is the history of financial crises. They have wreaked terrible damage on economies. Indeed, the damage tended to be even worse than what we have suffered.
Around the world over the last century, the typical financial crisis caused the jobless rate to rise for almost five years, according to work by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. On that timeline, our rate would still be rising in early 2012. Even that may be optimistic, given that the recent crisis was so bad. As Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson (Republicans both) and many others warned in 2008, this recession had the potential to become a depression.
Yet the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year.
For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing.”
It's not completely fixed yet with an unemployment rate above 9.0% but stimulus deniers are turning out to be worse lairs than birthers and global climate change deniers...
The liberal media with it's facts and hocus pocus science.
unemployment rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current..._CPS_Revisions
The problem lies in the fact that Obama didn't fix the conomy within 12 months.... We all know that turning around the economy is easy and usually only takes a couple of weeks to do it..
Yes...it's a great success!!!
Not exactly sure that it's all that good of an idea politically to brag about how successful the stimulus is with unemployment still at 10%, but whatever.............
Remember when Bush got in jet, flew onto an aircraft carrier, and declared "Mission
Accomplished" in Iraq?
The Obama administration arguing the stimulus has worked is the same thing.
Pretty much. Except Obama has a chance to actually get away with it. The economy was going to get better at some point regardless of what Bush, Obama or anyone else did. As long as Obama is around when that finally happens, he'll get to take credit for it. Presidents always get the credit or the blame for what happens, even though the economy is beyond the government's control.
"economy was going to get better at some point regardless"
It's hard to impossible to prove a negative, but the economy was very probably going to get a lot worse and stay bad for much longer than without the stimulus, of which only about half has been spent.
"the economy is beyond the government's control"
not true.
Repugs blocked the effort by a majority of the states to stop predatory lending which greatly contributed to Liar's Loans and stated-income bull , and toxic mortgages. Mortgage rules were not applied to lenders' ability to repay their mortgages.
Repugs SEC and various regulatory agencies "let the market self-regulate" which always fails, and did.
Annulling Glass-Steagal turned retail banks into investment bank casino players.
The Fed is inflated the bubble with effectively zero interest rates, even Greenspan admits that now.
Cutting taxes, a govt action, gave the super-wealthy $800B in liquidity that went chasing returns by dumping it into the non-regulating mortgage lending market.
Starting and botching two wars while cutting taxes inflated the deficit (after the Repugs inherited a 1/4 $T surplus).
etc, etc. There were plenty of (in)actions by the Repugs that could have limited the Banksters' Great Depression to just another business down cycle.
Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage are failures.
Repugs lets corps repatriate $300B in overseas profits at 5% tax rate rather than full corporate rate.
The Repugs ed up everything they touched and/or refused to manage. They simply aren't interested in governing the government, because they hate government.
lies!
impeach him!
Those graphs really comfort the actual people losing their jobs braaaaaah.
Keep up the good work.
wrong. the Obama admin is saying it's working, similar to Bush admin saying the war in Iraq is going "well"
misison accomplished has not been declared by Obama admin
isn't this where we wonder how much money was spent so he could land on that boat?
So it is the govt. that fixed everything? Not the actual citizens who actually had and continue to have jobs?
The economy is not 'fixed'.....nor is it better then it was a year ago.....
That is all.
People's reactions are not going to be nuanced on this; terminal statements or not. If the administration is claiming any type of success, with a ~10% unemployment rate; they are going to take it on the chin. Impressive graphs notwithstanding.
"So it is the govt. that fixed everything"
straw man. Who's claiming everything is fixed?
"Not the actual citizens who actually had and continue to have jobs"
how did, or how could, the job-ful "fix" the still-broken economy? The job-ful have paid down their debts, are saving, and are not consuming, which is badly needed as stimulus to get the consumer-driven, 70%, economy going. The job-ful are MIA as consumers.
The deficit spending is an attempt to make up what the consumers aren't spending.
The industry I work in was supposed to be one of the major benefactors of the stimulus.......it's not working.......
Nor am I blaming it on Obama, the Dems, or the Repubs........they're all ing idiots as far as I'm concerned.
How bad things would have gotten and how long it would have taken to recover are debatable. The economy eventually getting better under either scenario is not.
Yawn. The generic boutons rant placing all the blame on the republicans. Yet convienently ignoring pertinant facts like how the Glass Stengal repeals passed with overwhelming democratic support and were signed by a democratic president. Or how congressional democrats killed efforts to reign in the mortgage industry because they didn't want low income families (otherwise known as people who couldn't afford mortgages) to stop getting mortgages. Or how democrats joined with republicans in confirming Greenspan every single time he came up for a new term."the economy is beyond the government's control"
not true.
Repugs blocked the effort by a majority of the states to stop predatory lending which greatly contributed to Liar's Loans and stated-income bull , and toxic mortgages. Mortgage rules were not applied to lenders' ability to repay their mortgages.
Repugs SEC and various regulatory agencies "let the market self-regulate" which always fails, and did.
Annulling Glass-Steagal turned retail banks into investment bank casino players.
The Fed is inflated the bubble with effectively zero interest rates, even Greenspan admits that now.
Cutting taxes, a govt action, gave the super-wealthy $800B in liquidity that went chasing returns by dumping it into the non-regulating mortgage lending market.
Starting and botching two wars while cutting taxes inflated the deficit (after the Repugs inherited a 1/4 $T surplus).
etc, etc. There were plenty of (in)actions by the Repugs that could have limited the Banksters' Great Depression to just another business down cycle.
Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage are failures.
Repugs lets corps repatriate $300B in overseas profits at 5% tax rate rather than full corporate rate.
The Repugs ed up everything they touched and/or refused to manage. They simply aren't interested in governing the government, because they hate government.
Nor does anything in your rant illustrate how government action alone can eliminate economic cycles.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/02...y6198016.shtmlWhen you read that foreclosure filings fell 10% in January from December, don't get too excited. According to Realty Trac, foreclosures are 15% higher than they were a year ago and there's likely to be an increase in foreclosure activity in the next few months, as the government's crappy mortgage modification program continues to fail.
James J. Saccacio, CEO of RealtyTrac noted that "if history repeats itself we will see a surge in the numbers over the next few months as lenders foreclose on delinquent loans where neither the existing loan modification programs or the new short sale and deed-in-lieu of foreclosure alternatives works." In other words, another storm is a-brewing in the housing market.
The continued reluctance of banks to tackle the foreclosure problem is astounding. There's near-universal agreement that principal reduction is the key, but we are left with lame programs, like this one announced yesterday by CitiMortgage. The so-called "strategic non-foreclosure" continues the "extend and pretend" policy that bank lenders have pursued over the past year.
From the banks' point of view, the longer they keep you on the hook, the better it is for them. Avoiding the mess of foreclosure allows them to keep the fic ious valuations on their books and in this new Citi program, ensures that some of the costs of carrying the dud loan get transferred to the borrower, who in all likelihood, will end up defaulting. Some experts believe that a new round of foreclosures could trigger a double-dip in housing prices.
As if the foreclosure mess weren't enough to keep you up at night, today we're also digesting a new report from the Congressional Oversight Panel (that's Elizabeth Warren & Co, the TARP watchdogs) about the looming storm in the commercial real estate market. The report predicts a wave of losses, totaling $200-$300 billion, from commercial real estate loans could "trigger economic damage that could touch the lives of nearly every American."
Here's how the dire analysis plays out: "when commercial properties fail, it creates a downward spiral of economic contraction: job losses; deteriorating store fronts, office buildings and apartments; and the failure of the banks serving those communities." The report reminds us that the failure of community banks would further restrict small business access to capital, just the economic recovery is occurring.
Don't put away those shovels just yet - two potential storms could be coming.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,7573498.storyTrial modifications and other delays have kept many of those mortgages out of foreclosure, but by the end of this year, 2.4 million borrowers are expected to lose their homes, said Celia Chen, a housing economist at Economy.com.
That would be up from 2.1 million foreclosures and short sales last year and five times the annual numbers earlier in the decade.
lol.
the economy is still in the . nothing has changed.
All Obama did was pour it a few more drinks to keep the buzz alive.
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