Quick Fact: Fox's Varney claimed stimulus spending is “not very successful”

Written by Todd Gregory

Published

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.

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]