CBO Latest to Confirm Success of Stimulus

By Jon Perr
CrooksandLiars
Wednesday Feb 24

With its estimate Tuesday that the $787 billion Obama stimulus package created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last quarter of 2009, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) joined in the near-unanimous chorus of voices proclaiming the package's success. Of course, it wasn't just the overwhelming consensus of economists which concurred that the stimulus saved or created about two million jobs while adding over three percentage points to U.S. gross domestic product. As the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and ThinkProgress all documented, the hypocritical groveling of Republican Congressmen for stimulus dollars they opposed only served the validate that the recovery package was good public policy.

Echoing Obama administration claims that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) produced a net of between 1.5 and 2.0 million jobs for the economy, the CBO estimated that the economic stimulus law added between 1 million to 2.1 million workers to employment rolls by the end of last year. As ABC noted, the Recovery Act "also boosted the country's economic growth by 1.5 to 3.5 percent during the time period and lowered the nation's unemployment rate by between 0.5 and 1.1 percentage points."

And going forward, the CBO forecasts, the picture is brighter still:

CBO projects that the stimulus measure to have a greater impact this year, boosting gross domestic product by 1.4 to 4 percentage points and lowering the unemployment rate by 0.7 to 1.8 percentage points.

(Original here.)