Stop Obama's Last Chance at Healthcare Take Over
|
| |
Alert: (The Associated Press) Did the stimulus work or not? A year after Congress passed President Barack
Obama's huge economic revival plan, the results are mixed - and hardly final.
Despite Obama's bold promises, unemployment remains stubbornly high. But job losses have slowed
dramatically.
And the nation's recent economic growth is real, even though the government has spent just one-third of the
stimulus law's $862 billion so far. The program is to continue pumping federal money into the economy into
2011.
One year into the program:
- Many states and local governments owe their fiscal survival to the stimulus. But those governments are
scrambling to find ways to fill the holes in the coming year.
- Thousands of road and bridge projects broke ground with stimulus money, helping to keep the anemic
construction industry afloat. But job losses still were significant, with as many as one in four construction
workers unemployed.
Obama used Wednesday's one-year anniversary to offer his own assessment and, predictably, rated the
effort an unprecedented success.
"There has never been a program of this scale, moved at this speed, that has been enacted as effectively
and as transparently as the recovery act," the president declared.
But the legacy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is yet to be sealed.
In the next 12 months there will be a second wave of government spending, perhaps topping $300 billion. By
this time next year, the country could have a better idea whether the program was a costly, debt-increasing
blip that made ripples in the nation's economy, or a lifesaving jolt that shielded the country from a financial
abyss.
Obama argued on Wednesday that the history already had been written. "One year later, it is largely thanks to
the recovery act that a second depression is no longer a possibility," he said.
How are others to judge the recovery program?
When Obama launched it last year, he cast the program as bigger and better than just an ordinary jobs bill.
The program, he said, would provide lasting public works projects, improve education, save ailing state and
local governments, offer relief to millions devastated by losing their jobs and homes and help provide
much-needed health care.
Despite the broad range of those promises - and evidence shows that at least some of them have been kept
- Obama's stimulus will forever be judged by jobs. By the time the stimulus program kicked in last April, the
recession had cost the economy more than 6 million jobs. Since the program began, the nation has lost 2
million more.
Job creation became the administration's mantra. And the White House said the program would be held
accountable with an unprecedented public report of every job linked to the stimulus.
Indeed, the jobs were documented one by one on a new government Web site, and the administration
proudly pointed to more than 640,000 linked to the stimulus in the early months. It was the best evidence to
prove that the stimulus was well on its way to fulfilling Obama's promise of 3.5 million jobs saved or created
by the program.
But those counts were seriously flawed, including greatly exaggerated job claims, positions included that
had nothing to do with the stimulus, and spending that had nothing to do with saving or creating jobs. It was
a blow to Obama's efforts to prove the stimulus truly performed as promised, and it ended with the White
House deciding to count jobs the old fashioned way - by estimating.
When Obama signed the stimulus law, the nation's unemployment rate was 7.7 percent. His administration
had promised the program would stop the jobless rate from passing 8 percent. But weeks after the stimulus
became law, that threshold was broken.
Since that time, Republicans repeatedly asked "where are the jobs?" as monthly unemployment rates rose
to as high as 10 percent before dipping to 9.7 percent last month.
Some of those Republicans critical of the stimulus also have taken credit for projects in their districts paid
for by the program. "They can't really have it both ways," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer
said Wednesday.
The job losses have slowed over the past year, from a startling 779,000 in January 2009 to about 20,000 last
month. Obama's advisers are predicting actual job growth in the next few months.
Perhaps the best news for Obama has been the overall economic growth in recent months, a sure
indication of recovery. The gross domestic product, the broad mixture of the nation's economic activity, sank
at an annual rate of 6.4 percent at the beginning of last year but has rebounded to gain at a rate of 5.4
percent in the most recent quarter.
Economists generally agree the infusion of federal money contributed to that impressive growth, although
many credit a combination of other recovery programs including bank rescue efforts by Treasury and the
Federal Reserve.
There are more concrete examples of success when considering the other promises Obama made when
signing the stimulus law - better health care, better schools, better infrastructure.
The stimulus provided more Medicaid health benefits, unemployment checks, food stamps, tax cuts and
other relief to millions crippled by a tough economy. In fact, the expanded benefits led congressional budget
analysts to increase the overall cost of the stimulus by $75 billion.
The program also allowed states and local school systems to hold onto hundreds of thousands of teachers
and other school workers who might have been let go but for the extra federal money. The single greatest
count of jobs saved under the stimulus goes to school employees whose jobs were threatened by deep
deficits in local and state budgets.
Obama's promise of a better infrastructure remains at least partially unfulfilled. Last year, he said stimulus
spending would pay for "remaking the American landscape" with new highways, bridges and transit that "will
bring real and lasting change for generations to come."
But much of the transportation stimulus money spent last year went to paving existing roads and repairing
bridges that were not among those in the worst shape. State transportation officials described them as
necessary projects, but the initiative doesn't live up to Obama's claim that his infrastructure spending
compared to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's mammoth Interstate building program of the 1950s.
|
|
