Seven years after he started it, President Obama will tout the 2009 stimulus law this week, arguing that the emergency spending measure helped turn the economy around.
Obama on Friday will visit a battery company in Florida that benefited from the stimulus, National Economic Council Director Jeffrey Zients announced in a blog post at midnight.
“Today it’s clear: the president’s decisions worked,” Zients wrote.
“Republicans in Washington spent most of their time trying to turn ‘stimulus’ into a bad word,” Zients said. “They trashed the president’s plan to dig us out of recession before dusting off their gold shovels and oversized scissors to take credit at groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings when his work paid off in their communities. At times, it may have been an effective political strategy, but it wasn’t the right thing to do.”
Saft, the Jacksonville business that Obama will visit, makes lithium-ion batteries in a facility funded by the stimulus, according to the White House.
Signed into law just a month into Obama’s tenure on Feb. 17, 2009, the stimulus was one of Obama’s first-term policies that stoked outrage among conservatives and helped lead to the creation of the Tea Party.
The law’s combination of spending, tax cuts and state grants ultimately will add $840 billion to federal deficits, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Most of the spending occurred in 2010, with the economy suffering badly in a recession.
The stimulus was meant to counteract the fall in demand for goods and services in the private sector, but from early on it was criticized from the Left, for being too small, and from the Right, for expanding government and adding to deficits.
At times, Obama seemed to share in the public disapproval of the stimulus, saying at one point in 2010 that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” of the kind initially envisioned for the stimulus.
Yet concern over government spending has abated as Congress has imposed cuts on discretionary spending and deficits have fallen to roughly a third of what they were in the year the stimulus was started.
