Stimulus Deserves “Big Heaping of Credit” on Jobs: NYT
There is a lot of heat and not much light when two politicians from opposite parties debate the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). While Democrats complain about Republicans’ hypocrisy in proudly spending ARRA funding they voted against, their GOP colleagues say the additional debt on top of the country’s trillion-dollar load when President Obama took office will ultimately be self-defeating.
That’s why we have journalists to sort things out.
Today’s contribution to the short-run debate (only history’s judgment will be definitive) comes from the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, who writes that ARRA almost certainly had its intended effect and then some. He looks at hard data and economic analyses, including those of conservatives, to say that on the jobs figures alone, the stimulus bill deserves a “big heaping of credit.”
He runs through the arguments that have made the measure unpopular and pretty much debunks each one by one, using as many facts as can fit in a newspaper column. It’s a reasoned, fair take on an issue that we need to get straight so we can decide what to do next: pass a weak jobs bill or admit that ARRA was a success and enact another, smaller sequel.