GOP: stimulus didn't work! Really? 80% of economists polled say it did - U.S. News

[Bill USA]

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/06/20/why-the-economic-stimulus-worked

Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf told Congress recently, "Our position is that the [2009] Recovery Act was not a failed program. Our position is that it created higher output and employment than would have occurred without it."

Of course, not all economists agree. But in a survey by the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, 80 percent of the 40 or so economists surveyed agreed with the Congressional Budget Office, known as the CBO, that the unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus law. The survey asked a second question about whether—accounting for future costs arising from financing the stimulus with debt—its benefits would end up exceeding its costs. Here, 46 percent thought that they would and another 27 percent were uncertain, leaving only a small percentage that did not.

The economists were also asked how confident they were in their answer. When the answers were weighted by each expert's confidence, only 4 percent of respondents believed the stimulus did not lower unemployment and only 14 percent believed that the benefits would not end up exceeding the costs.

The two charts below from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' chart book, "The Legacy of the Great Recession", illustrate the CBO's estimates of the success of the Recovery Act—officially, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—in keeping real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) from falling more and the unemployment rate from rising more than they did.

[TrogL]

1. How many of those economists were from the Chicago school?

[Bill USA]

2. yeah, good point - the school of ideological economics. I'm assuming they polled more than just

their own 'true believers', but don't know if it was a representative sample.

Here's an article that was published in 2010 in USA Today. They polled 50 economists who said ARRA helped, but their results are presented as the economists median estimate of how much the unemployment rate would have been without the stimulus.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-01-25-usa-today-economic-survey-obama-stimulus_N.htm