Quick Fact: Fox's Varney claimed stimulus spending is "not very successful"
Stuart Varney claimed on America's Newsroom that money from the economic recovery act has been spent "not very successfully, according to many analysts," in order to attack any proposal to "spend more stimulus-type money." But the Congressional Budget Office estimated that stimulus spending through September had saved or created as many as 1.6 million jobs and added as much as 3.2 percent to U.S.gross domestic product.
Please upgrade your flash player. The video for this item requires a newer version of Flash Player. If you are unable to install flash you can download a QuickTime version of the video.
From the December 7 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
ALISYN CAMEROTA (co-anchor): Didn't we already spend $787 billion on the stimulus, also job creation?
VARNEY: Yeah, yeah. Now, that is the stimulus bill. That's separate from the $700 billion TARP bill, OK? The stimulus -- yep, $787 billion, about a third of it spent, not very successfully, according to many analysts. Now we want to spend some more stimulus-type money, taken from TARP. Got it?
Fact: CBO estimated recovery act created or saved jobs, added to GDP
In a November analysis, the CBO estimated that through the third quarter of 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created or saved between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs and added between 1.2 percent and 3.2 percent to GDP:
CBO estimates that in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States, and real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.2 percent to 3.2 percent higher, than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA (see Table 1). Those ranges are intended to reflect the uncertainty of such estimates and to encompass most economists' views on the effects of fiscal stimulus. [CBO's Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output as of September 2009, November 2009]
Since the February passage of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, roughly $188 million in stimulus money has been spent at Hanford, allowing cleanup mangers to begin, in their words, "shrinking the footprint" of the overall mess left by 40 years of weapons-grade plutonium production. Most of the money has gone to CH2M Hill, the Colorado-based mega-engineering and consulting firm that has the contract for handling the biggest chunk of the cleanup.
The company has used stimulus dollars to hire the equivalent of 2,100 full-time employees, ranging from truck drivers and laborers making $22 to $27 an hour to highly skilled nuclear engineers. Average annual pay is about $70,000.
How does this help with multi-year job growth? It is easy to dump a large amount of money and artificially inflate GDP and Job growth, getting it to stay beyond one year is much more difficult.
In CA, a lot of money has gone into building retrofits for cleaner infrastructure systems (like air, electric, etc.). While great for improving underlying systems, job growth is only temporary. Many of the retrofits take 3-9 Months and after that the jobs go away.
Point is, no one can point to permanent and stable job growth. Government jobs and contracts are not job creation, they are simply tax payer funded projects. If they are permanent, who pays for them next year?
What's the alternative that we're constantly sold? Cut taxes on the rich, and it will "create" jobs by "investment" and "expansion." It didn't work when Bush did it, and it's not going to work now. Maybe a few of the rich will take their tax cuts and invest and expand... in CHINA, INDIA and MEXICO, and they may hire a few people to man phones in the states for ***t wages, but it won't spur widespread American job growth.