James Pinkerton doesn't think these construction workers count as beneficiaries of the stimulus, because they're not "Yale Law grads" or "Goldman Sachs."
Folks are in a hurry to pronounce the administration's stimulus plan a failure. For instance, here's James Pinkerton commenting, in an astonishingly uninformed post, that "Obviously the 'stimulus' was a a dud--and the rate that things are going, the next 'stimulus'" too, will be a dud." (Confirming the oft-true observation that a sentence preceded by the word "obviously" is likely to lack any obviousness at all.) The useful folks at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have put together a report that dispels some of the confusion surrounding the recovery act. For instance: 1: The recent rise in unemployment does not mean the law is not working."[I]f policymakers had not been able to pass a stimulus plan, real GDP would have declined nearly 6% in the second quarter and by more than 3% in the third,” Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com wrote last month. “With the stimulus, GDP is expected to fall close to 3% in the second quarter and rise a bit in the third." ...The continuing deterioration in the job market was expected as well. As CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf observed in May, “labor market indicators tend to lag changes in economic activity. The pattern of past recessions suggests that employment will not increase and the unemployment rate will not decline until 6 to 12 months after output begins to increase again.”CBO has projected that, even with the recovery law, unemployment will continue to rise at least through the end of this year.But here, too, the recovery law has had a positive effect....“[T]he stimulus results in approximately 2.5 million more jobs by the end of 2010 than would have been the case without it,” Zandi wrote, “and leaves the unemployment rate almost 2 percentage points lower.”Imagine that -- the whole report is worth checking out. Keep in mind as well that even though the stimulus was not big enough to prevent the worst consequences of the recession, that doesn't make it a "dud," just as if you wouldn't complain about being starving if you only had enough room in your car to bring half of your groceries home from the store. Why, you might even want to make a second trip!Meanwhile, you have great rhetoric like the following statement from Republican "rising star" and South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley.
“This stimulus has done nothing more than create additional expenses with no way to pay for them. All it did was mandate new programs.”The second sentence of her quote is factually incorrect. I'm assuming the fact that Politico ran the quote unchallenged is a sly commentary on Haley and a not an editorial decision to print something totally false. The first sentence, on the other hand, is a beautiful monument to economic ignorance and the conservative idea that programs to protect people during a rough economy are "nothing more than...additional expenses," whereas tax cuts can somehow pay for themselves. One wonders if the South Carolina voters who are being helped through the recession by temporary expansions of unemployment insurance and medicare funding think those benefits are just "expenses" or if they find them to be worthwhile services.
-- Tim Fernholz
