Did it work?
No.
As some wag noted at the time, it was stimulating in the same way a clumsy ugly person doing a pole dance was.
3 thoughts on “Five Years Of Stimulus”
Comments are closed.
Did it work?
No.
As some wag noted at the time, it was stimulating in the same way a clumsy ugly person doing a pole dance was.
Comments are closed.
“from the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers.”
Didn’t Obama meet with these guys just a handful of times? Any report that comes out of this sham council is very suspect. Obama doesn’t have the credibility to give any weight to anything the council produces at this late date.
Did it work?
It depends upon your definition of success. Did it actually improve the ecomony and reduce unemployment? No, of course not. Did it send hundreds of billions of dollars to Democrat constituencies and cronies? Some 90% of the money went to state employees (union members, mostly) and other groups inclined to donate to the Democrats. Billions more went to failed “green energy” efforts like Solyndra. And those people in turn donated money back to the Democrats. It also increased the federal budget baseline by hundreds of billions of dollars a year (why do you think Harry Reid refused to pass a budget for so long?). By those political measures (the only ones that count to Obama et. al.), the stimulus was a roaring success. For everyone else, not so much.
The stimulus did stimulate something; it stimulated the national debt.
The stimulus was at best economic ignorance writ large. It didn’t work because it couldn’t work. The Obama administration proved it with those charts showing what the unemployment rate would be with and without it (reality, as usual, ended up in broad disagreement with their forecasts) However, it is stretching credulity past the breaking point to allow simple stupidity to be the excuse, so that leaves corruption. However, in all due fairness, I suppose we must give the the benefit of the doubt and allow that it could be both stupidity and corruption.