It has become common wisdom that the economic stimulus enacted in Feb. 2009 "failed." This judgment is typically based on the fact that Christine Roemer--then the head of Obama's council of economic advisers--predicted that the stimulus would lower the unemployment rate to 7% by now. Obviously, that didn't happen.
However, the reason that didn't occur is not because the stimulus failed to stimulate the economy by the predicted amount. It did. Independent economic analyses from the CBO to Moodys estimated that the stimulus indeed added or saved about the same number of jobs that the Obama administration predicted. The problem wasn't a lack of stimulative effect, but a failure to accurately estimate how deep the recession would be. Ezra Klein has a great post on this explaining that a much bigger stimulus than the $780 billion we got was called for, but that it is unclear whether--even if it were politically possible--we could have efficiently spent the $2 trillion in stimulus that would be required to fill in the hole created by this economic calamity.
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