Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.

[Emit]

Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.

Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.

If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?

Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren’t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.

~snip~

Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s 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.

Cont'd: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html?hp

[ChicagoSuz219]

1. The only criticism I've heard from people I trust...

...is that it wasn't big enough. Maybe it's time to roll out the other half of it...

[Better Believe It]

2. If more of that money had been devoted to job creation the unemployment rate would be less than 8%

If only 200 billion had been used to finance the over 10,000 useful projects proposed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors rather than tax cuts, nearly 2 million more jobs would have been created and many more saved.