I’ll look later but the 2009 Reinvestment act was a complete disaster. Do some research
You do some research. No doubt you will find something that supports your opinion.
Was the Obama Stimulus a Success or a Failure?
Rick Cohen
August 15, 2012
PRO:
According to the Moody’s website Economy.com, JPMorgan Chase, and the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus “increased GDP at least 2 percentage points, the difference between contraction and growth, and saved or created about 2.5 million jobs.”
“A Washington Post review of Recovery Act studies found six that showed a positive economic effect versus one useful study (by prominent Republican economist John B. Taylor) that concluded the stimulus failed—and critics noted that Taylor’s data just as easily support the conclusion that the stimulus was too small.”
The Recovery Act’s provision of extra food stamps, unemployment benefits, and other social safety net protections “made an extraordinarily painful time less painful, lifting at least 7 million Americans above the poverty line while making 32 million poor Americans less poor.”
“(T)he Recovery Act was the biggest, most transformative energy bill in history, financing unprecedented government investments in a smarter grid, cleaner coal, energy efficiency in every imaginable form, ‘green-collar’ job training, electric vehicles and the infrastructure to support them, advanced biofuels and the refineries to brew them, renewable power from the sun, the wind, and the heat below the earth, and factories to manufacture all that green stuff in the United States.”
“The stimulus was also the biggest and most transformative education reform bill since the Great Society, shaking up public schools with a ‘Race to the Top’ competition designed to reward innovation and punish mediocrity.”
“It was a big and transformative health-care bill, too, laying the foundation for Obama’s even bigger and more transformative reforms a year later; for example, it poured $27 billion into computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system, which should reduce redundant tests, dangerous drug interactions, and fatal errors by doctors with chicken-scratch handwriting.”
“It included America’s biggest foray into industrial policy since FDR, the biggest expansion of anti-poverty initiatives since LBJ, the biggest middle-class tax cut since Ronald Reagan, and the biggest infusion of research money ever. It sent $8 billion into a new high-speed passenger rail network, the biggest new transportation initiative since the interstate highways, and another $7 billion to expand the country’s existing high-speed Internet network to underserved communities, a modern twist on the New Deal’s rural electrification.”
“Experts had warned that 5 percent of the stimulus could be lost to fraud, but investigators have documented less than $10 million in losses—about 0.001 percent.”
The homelessness prevention provisions of the Recovery Act helped house 1.2 million Americans who might have significantly added to the nation’s homeless population otherwise.
PRO or CON (depending on your perspective)
The actual direct and tax expenditure of the stimulus was, at last count, $831 billion, which according to Grunwald was “larger than the entire New Deal in constant dollars.”
“[Solyndra is]… supposedly a case study in ineptitude, cronyism, and the failure of green industrial policy. Republicans investigated for a year, held more than a dozen hearings, and subpoenaed hundreds of thousands of documents, but they uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing….Solyndra was a start-up that failed. It happens.”
CONS
There were some “silly expenditures, like costumes for water-safety mascots…and fictitious expenditures, like levitating trains to Disneyland” and other examples of expenditures that might have qualified for the late Sen. William Proxmire’s regular “Golden Fleece” awards.
The jobless rate was still over eight percent, the longest run of unemployment over eight percent since the Depression.
“Some of Obama’s progressive critics…complain that he should have gotten more out of Congress once it became clear the initial jolt wouldn’t restore a vibrant economy…[Paul] Krugman, who had warned that inadequate stimulus would give stimulus a bad name, had been right.”
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/was-the-obama-stimulus-a-success-or-a-failure/
