Editorial
What the Stimulus Accomplished
Of
all the myths and falsehoods that Republicans have spread about
President Obama, the most pernicious and long-lasting is that the $832
billion stimulus package did not work. Since 2009, Republican lawmakers
have inextricably linked the words “failed” and “stimulus,” and last
week, five years after passage of the Recovery Act, they dusted off
their old playbook again.
“The ‘stimulus’ has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and big spending with little results,”
wrote Speaker John Boehner. “Five years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, millions of families are still asking, ‘where are the jobs?’ ”
The stimulus could have done more good
had it been bigger
and more carefully constructed. But put simply, it prevented a second
recession that could have turned into a depression. It created or saved
an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years. (
There
are the jobs, Mr. Boehner.) It raised the nation’s economic output by 2
to 3 percent from 2009 to 2011. It prevented a significant increase in
poverty — without it, 5.3 million additional people would have become
poor in 2010.
And
yet Republicans were successful in discrediting the very idea that
federal spending can boost the economy and raise employment. They made
the argument that the stimulus was a failure not just to ensure that Mr.
Obama would get no credit for the recovery that did occur, but to
justify their obstruction of all further attempts at stimulus.
So
the American Jobs Act was killed, and so was the
infrastructure bank and any number of other spending proposals that might have helped the country. The president’s
plan to spend another $56 billion
on job training, education and energy efficiency, to be unveiled in his
budget next month, will almost certainly suffer a similar fate.
This
may be the singular tragedy of the Obama administration. Five years
later, it is clear to all fair-minded economists that the stimulus did
work, and that it did enormous good for the economy and for tens of
millions of people. But because it fell short of its goals, and was
roundly ridiculed by Republicans and
inadequately defended by Democrats, who should have trumpeted its success, the president’s stimulus plan is now widely considered a stumble.
This
enabled Republicans to champion an austerity policy that produced deep
reductions in discretionary spending, undoing many of the gains begun in
2009. The result has been a post-stimulus recovery that remains weak
and struggling, undermining an economic legacy that should be seen as a
remarkable accomplishment.
The legacy of that policy, detailed by the White House last week in its
final report on the effects of the stimulus,
affects virtually every American who drives, uses mass transit, or
drinks water. It improved 42,000 miles of road, fixed or replaced 2,700
bridges, and bought more than 12,000 transit vehicles. It cleaned up
water supplies, created the school reforms of the Race to the Top
program, and greatly expanded the use of renewable energy and broadband
Internet service.
It’s
probably too late for the White House to persuade skeptics about its
program, but its assessment echoes the views of many independent
economists and the independent
Congressional Budget Office. “The Recovery Act was not a failed program,” the C.B.O.’s director,
Douglas Elmendorf, told annoyed Republican lawmakers in 2012. “Our position is that it created higher output and employment than would have occurred without it.”
Government
spending worked, helping millions of people who never realized it. And
it can work again, whenever lawmakers agree that putting people to work
is more important than winning ideological fights.
A version of this editorial appears in print on February 23, 2014, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: What the Stimulus Accomplished.
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