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dolemitejb
(Pogo)[quote]Also Obama's stimulous plan did help the recession from going deeper and avert a collapse of the banks and a real depression.
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dolemitejb
There is no proof of this.
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Excerpt from an article by David Corn. Not only has "IHS Global Insight and Moody's Economy.com have estimated the stimulus has added 1.6 to 1.8 million jobs to the economy," a number of the Republicans who voted against the stimulous bill then used the money for projects in their states and took credit for it.
Are GOPers Deliberately Lying About the Stimulus?
http://readersupportednews.org...g-about-the-stimulus David Corn
Columnist
Are GOPers Deliberately Lying About the Stimulus?
Posted:
02/19/10
For days, Republicans derided the stimulus, which they had voted against, as a flop that has achieved nothing. Independent sources, though, say that's not so. IHS Global Insight and Moody's Economy.com have estimated the stimulus has added 1.6 to 1.8 million jobs to the economy. And the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office put this number at 2.4 million. And throughout the week, the Democratic Party sent out e-mails to reporters documenting instances when leading congressional Republicans who denounced the stimulus have taken credit for stimulus-funded projects in their districts or states. This list of GOP hypocrites includes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John Boehner, Sen. Lamar Alexander, Sen. Kit Bond, and nine other senators. (The Center for American Progress, a liberal group, issued a report noting that 111 House Republicans who voted against the Recovery Act have claimed credit for projects it has financed.)
Beyond this rank hypocrisy -- which is par for the course in Washington -- the issue is whether the Republican Party is knowingly pushing a lie. There's no doubt that the party's leading lights have spoken falsely about the stimulus. But have they been deliberately lying? Recently, newly elected Sen. Scott Brown declared that the stimulus bill "didn't create one new job." Politifact.com, an independent fact-checking outfit, branded that remark a "pants on fire" lie.
And look at a statement House Minority Leader Eric Cantor zapped out this week. It proclaimed, "1 Year, $862 Billion, 4 Million Jobs Lost." Cantor maintained that since the stimulus was enacted, there has been "no job creation." Poltifact.com could award him its lowest honor, as well. But Cantor went beyond that false statement. He fiddled with the numbers. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, in the year prior to passage of the Recovery Act, the nation lost 5.9 million jobs. In the year, since then, the rate of job loss has fallen dramatically, with the economy shedding about 2 million jobs. That's a lot of jobs, but it's half the number that Cantor claimed, and one-third the number of jobs lost prior to the stimulus. If you click to this chart of job losses over the past year, you'll see that job loss peaked shortly before the stimulus passed and steadily decreased in the months afterward, almost reaching zero in December.
Critics can challenge various aspects of the stimulus bill; they can argue that perhaps there are better ways to use this money to boost the economy. But Cantor's attempt to connect the stimulus bill to the loss of 4 million jobs is utterly disingenuous. By the way, last year, Cantor tried to win funding from the stimulus program for a high-speed rail project in Virginia, noting that this would lead to "economic development and job growth."
Obama has indeed lost the message war, and he and his crew can be slammed for that. But a more serious matter is how Republican officials are poisoning the national discourse with demonstrably false information -- which undermines policymaking and, thus, the potential for economic recovery. The real narrative is not how Obama has bumbled the politics, but how the Republicans are killing the truth.
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