1 Year In, Stimulus Has Saved 2M Jobs

It may not “yet feel like much of a recovery” to jobless Americans, President Obama concedes, but it’s thanks to the massive economic stimulus package passed a year ago “that a second depression is no longer a possibility.” Obama celebrated the anniversary of the recovery act today with a reminder that it had saved or created around 2 million jobs. And David Leonhardt seconds the president's claim. The “best-known economic research firms” all agree with the president’s jobs numbers, he writes in the New York Times.

And second, Leonhardt adds, Vice President Biden is right when he notes that critics fail to acknowledge that we’re only “halfway through the act.” Calling the stimulus a failure now is “almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.”
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