The Stimulus in Action

It wasn't big enough, (we'll find that out the hard way when it starts to run out this fall) but the stimulus succeeded in creating jobs and saving our economy.

New York Times:

Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.

Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.

If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?

Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren’t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.

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.

So while the Republicans will naturally continue to criticize something in invalidates their theory of government, it sure won't stop them from touting the projects that created jobs in their districts.

I'm a big believer in the power of images and graphics to convey things that words cannot. With that in mind, I better see this graph in the news an average of 6000 times a week between now and November:



Update: Holy crap this ad is brilliant:



WHERE THE HELL WERE THESE PEOPLE DURING THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE?

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?