Despite Republicans’ all-out assault on the Barack Obama White House, the stimulus package has been hailed as a success by several renowned economic research firms, The New York Times has reported.
The economic firms HIS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Econony.com have all estimated that Obama’s bill has created 1.6 to 1.8 million jobs. A fourth agency, the independent Congressional Budget Office, goes so far as to assert that the numbers may be conservative in estimation. They believe the job creation exceeds two million.
The Times purports that the stimulus package has not been viewed positively because the economy has not recovered, many families are struggling, and the country’s climb back to firm footing is moving at an excruciatingly slow pace, frustrating all parties.
Conservatives and Tea Party organizers have thus far been successful in harpooning every Obama initiative while simultaneously taking credit for any positive news that emanates from the White House. Moreover, liberal Democrats never liked the stimulus package because they believed Obama should have spent more on the recovery effort, while the Republican Party hates it strictly because “it’s a Democratic program,” says the Times citing that “the bill’s popularity [makes] too rosy an economic forecast upon taking office.”
Pundits from the economic research firm state unequivocally that without the stimulus package, the nation’s economic woes would have catastrophic results in nature and scope. They point out that the stimulus enabled millions of unemployed workers to receive employment compensation far beyond the usual time span and it kept many states’ nurses, firefighters and police officers on the streets.
Obama’s stimulus package deserves significant credit for keeping the nation afloat when it appeared it would sink. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing,” she says. –terry shropshire
