One year ago today, Barack Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus. At the time of its passage, the White House claimed the stimulus would keep unemployment from rising above eight percent. By late summer, when joblessness was moving toward 10 percent, a Gallup poll found that 57 percent of those surveyed felt the stimulus had either no effect or was making the economy worse, and slightly more than half felt Congress had spent too much on the recovery bill. At a time when the president was gearing up for a fight over his proposed national health care bill, he found himself on the defensive over the stimulus, as well.
And that is where the administration has been ever since. So today, on the first anniversary of the bill, we’re seeing an across-the-board stimulus promotion offensive from the White House and the Democratic Party. Last night, the White House sent out embargoed copies of Vice President Biden’s annual report on the stimulus’ implementation. In the report, Biden revives the administration’s once-common, then-abandoned, and now-revived “created or saved” standard for measuring the stimulus’ effects. “One year after the passage of the Act, we can report that approximately 2 million jobs have been created or saved thanks to the Act’s impact on hiring in the private sector, by local and state governments and by non-profits,” Biden writes.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has been on the attack against Republican critics of the stimulus, creating a “Recovery Act Hypocrisy Hall of Fame” for GOP lawmakers who Democrats say denounced the stimulus but welcome its funds in their states and districts. The Democratic attacks are being amplified by friendly media figures — see MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hitting Republican Rep. Aaron Schock on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”
For their part, Republicans are sending out a new statement by a Democrat — retiring Sen. Evan Bayh — who said that “If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”
“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, and no wonder,” writes the Republican Study Committee. “In the last year, the U.S. economy has lost around 3.5 million jobs, according to statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). There are another 6.1 million Americans who want to work but for various reasons aren’t counted by the BLS as part of the labor force (and thus don’t show up in the generally quoted unemployment rate).”
So the battle will rage all day, and then all year. Bottom line: Obama, Biden, and Democrats on Capitol Hill can talk all they want about the stimulus’ supposed benefits, but it won’t do them any good until the unemployment rate begins to go down and continues to go down — not a month or two of declines, but a consistent pattern of decline to a level at which the public feels things are definitely getting better. To that end, the White House is touting a new column by the New York Times’ David Leonhardt who confidently reports “the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year.” If that happens, the administration will get credit. If it doesn’t, no annual report will convince Americans things are better. And even in the best scenario, it’s not clear whether any improvement would come quickly enough to help Democrats in November’s elections.
