It's been five years since the passage of the stimulus package that saved millions of jobs when our economy was in a free fall, but that hasn't stopped Faux "news" and the Republicans from continuing to spread the zombie lie that the Recovery Act supposedly didn't work.
As Think Progress reported, Republicans started off the day attacking it: Republicans Slam Stimulus On Fifth Anniversary — But Most Took Credit For It Back Home:
Monday marks the five-year anniversary of the passage of the American Recovery Act, President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus stimulus package that invested in everything from infrastructure projects to electronic medical health care records and alternative energy sources. Every single Republican in the House and almost every Republican in the Senate — with the exception of Former Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) — voted against the measure and today the GOP continues to deride the law as wasteful an ineffective.
But as ThinkProgress reported throughout 2009, over half of the GOP caucus praised the effects of the stimulus or took credit for the federal dollars in their home districts and states — despite repeatedly voting against it in Washington D.C. Below is a list of the top 13 stimulus hypocrites:
Go read the rest for the list of Republican members of Congress who have been talking out of both sides of their mouths. And right in lockstep, here's Fox this Monday morning: 5 Years Since Stimulus: 'Maybe the Most Expensive Policy Mistake Ever':
It's been exactly five years since President Obama signed the economic stimulus package into law. Jenna Lee talked to economist and FNC contributor Steve Moore this morning about whether the country has gotten what it paid nearly a trillion dollars for.
Here are some statistics:
- The unemployment rate then was 8.3 percent, while now it is down to 6.6 percent.
- The labor participation rate five years ago was 65.8 percent, while now it's dropped to 63 percent.
- There were nearly 13 million unemployed Americans in Feb. 2009, while now the total stands at 10.2 million.
- The number of people on food stamps has gone from 32.3 million then to 47 million as of last November.
"[The stimulus] was maybe the most expensive policy mistake ever made in Washington. ... If you look at what the president and his economic advisers told us was gonna happen five years ago - we were gonna have three million more jobs than we have, we were gonna have an unemployment rate below six percent by now," said Moore.
He pointed out the hundreds of billions spent on jobless benefits, green energy subsidies, and expansions of the Medicaid and food stamp programs. Moore said the stimulus spending led to the "meekest recovery we have had since the end of World War II" and noted that the latest Fox News poll showed two-thirds of Americans believe the economy is still in recession.
He disputed that there is any evidence that the trillion in spending improved the economy.
Of course those numbers don't mean very much when you ignore the fact that we've had nothing but record GOP obstruction blocking any further economic stimulus at every turn, and the fact that government austerity has been holding back our economic growth, and that we need more spending right now instead of obsessing over the debt and deficit as Moore was doing in the segment above.
And what were Stephen Moore's solutions to our economic problems? You guessed it. Tax cuts, deregulation and repeal Obamacare.
