Barack Obama just spoke and offered a strong defense of the Recovery Act, which he signed into law one year ago today. This complements a wide-ranging set of efforts from Administration officials to both show the importance of the stimulus in moving the economy from failure toward recovery, and to put Republicans in a box, calling them out for hypocrisy on voting against projects they tout in their districts.
The graphic at right can be seen pretty much everywhere today, showing the gradual decline in job loss since the enactment of the Recovery Act. In the three months before enactment, 2.2 million jobs were lost, and the economy has not been handed over to a new President in such a shambles since the Hoover/Roosevelt trade in 1933. Since then, Administration officials say, job growth has converted from a 6 percent loss to a 6 percent gain, with much of that turnaround attributable to the Recovery Act. And job loss has slowed dramatically, with net job gains expected in the spring. This annual report prepared by the Vice President’s office provides much of the rhetorical bulwark for this defense, and you can see the bullet point version of this on an Organizing for America page blasted to supporters. But David Leonhardt’s analytical case for the stimulus in the New York Times today has the benefit of being from a source without a vested interest:
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.
Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.
And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.
In addition to this defense, Democrats from the Administration on down are trying to pin some hypocritical behavior on Republicans, faulting them for voting against the Recovery Act, continuing to term it a failure, and then showing up in their own districts touting the funding for various projects. President Obama made special mention of that in his remarks today, saying that Republicans continue to argue against the stimulus “even as many of them show up for ribbon-cutting ceremonies for projects in their districts.” This Web ad put out by the DNC similarly details Recovery Act hypocrisy.
But Democrats have to walk a tightrope when discussing the Recovery Act. As David Leonhardt noted, the stimulus should have been bigger to cover the tremendous shortfall in demand from early 2009. Its more modest size and reliance on tax cuts for about 1/3 of its total has blunted its impact. While 2 million jobs have been created or saved, people are still losing work and the unemployment rate is still unreasonably high. Obama said today that, “Despite the extraordinary work that has been done in Recovery Act, millions of Americans are still out of work… it doesn’t yet feel like much of a recovery. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to return people to work.”
This is just a difficult rhetorical pirouette; saying “we’re only half done” is cold comfort to the jobless and job-insecure. And it isn’t helped by the fact that Obama led off his remarks by saying things like “No large expenditure is ever that popular,” which depresses any enthusiasm for another jobs bill, and is also fundamentally untrue. All of the “new foundation for growth” investments on things like education and high speed rail and infrastructure and US manufacturing and clean energy poll very high, and there’s no reason to dampen that popularity with such a blanket statement.
The Recovery Act has undoubtedly been a boost to the economy, and it’s good to see some energy spent on defending it. But its initial size makes it difficult to view as a success without major public education, and until job growth returns – which necessitates real job creation measures, not the sliver that’s moving through the Senate – the task grows even more difficult.
