Another legitimate question is could the money have been spent faster or more wisely? As was discussed plenty at the time by the administration and the press, the government isn’t just dropping hundreds of billions from helicopters and hoping it gets spent to juice the economy (although it certainly seems that way sometimes! See ProPublica’s sweet Eye on the Stimulus blog). It’s actually hard to spend that amount of money so quickly. So, only $60 billion of the $500 billion in stimulus spending has actually gone out the door so far—12 percent—in the twenty-one weeks since it was signed into law.
What’s going on here, Time? A clue can be found in the sole interview conducted for the piece, dropped in the last paragraph. It’s with a fellow from the far-right American Enterprise Institute:
“I don’t buy the argument that you just have to give the stimulus package more time… By the test they put forward to grade the stimulus, it is failing.”
That’s intellectually dishonest, of course, but I guess an appropriate kicker for this piece.
Shenanigans! They made specific predictions and warned of dire consequences if this colloasla wast of money wasn’t passed. They even put out an f-ing graph “demonstrating” what the unemployment rate would look like with and without the stimulus! We sure as shit can blame the “stimulus” for not preventing the unemployment rate from skyrocketing, because these jagoffs specifically promised up green grass and blue skies, and people like you in the press lapped it up.
They set the bar by which this was going to be judged and not you reject people holding them to their own standard?
I think you should go back to your daily Santelli bashing.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 12:52 PM
The truth is it's never possible to say whether any economic policy is working, because as hard as it is to predict what the economy will be doing in six months, it's a thousand times harder to predict what it would be doing if you hadn't done what you did. All claims about how many jobs a policy will save, or how much it will reduce the unemployment rate, should be understood as mere hand-waving.
#2 Posted by D. B., CJR on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 09:36 PM