Budget Office: Obama's Stimulus Failed on Jobs (CBO: Obama stimulus fails)
Newsmax ^ | 11/23/2011 | Paul Scicchitano
Posted on November 23, 2011 7:41:50 PM EST by Signalman
In a blow to the Obama administration, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that the president’s economic stimulus plan created fewer jobs than expected and “crowds out” private investment.
A new report the CBO released on Tuesday finds that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act may have boosted the economy in the short run by sustaining some 700,000 jobs at its peak in 2010 but “will reduce output slightly in the long run — by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.”
The report estimates that the total number of jobs the plan produced was far fewer than the 3.5 million the Obama administration predicted during the peak of spending.
The CBO estimates that the stimulus is responsible for sustaining between 600,000 to 1.8 million jobs during this quarter, which lowered the nation’s unemployment rate by as much as 1 percent.
In July, the conservative Weekly Standard estimated that Obama’s stimulus package had cost taxpayers $278,000 for every job it created.
There was no immediate comment from the White House on the CBO report, but officials haveinsisted in the past that the economy would have fallen into a depression without the jobs act..
In September, White House press secretary Jay Carney called it “uncontestable” that the infrastructure projects the act created “were very well managed, came in on budget or under budget and led to the creation of many, many jobs” that would not have been created otherwise.
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