February 17th, 2010:

Re:  Economic Scene – Success of Stimulus Bill Is Noteworthy as Another Is Weighed – NYTimes.com, By DAVID LEONHARDT, Published: February 16, 2010

Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.

Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.

If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?

Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren’t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Instead of the constant drone of Obama bashing from the right and the left we finally have a paper that is brave enough to publish the truth. Too many times the media is hesitant to support President Obama. It doesn’t sell many papers. Rather, they would publish pieces by Krugman and Reich slamming Obama from the left because supporting Obama in this time of the radicalization of the right with a friendly word or two frankly just doesn’t have that cutting edge that sells. Both of them find avenues of fact to support their populist rants.

Finally seeing something that actually helps the predicament we all face sure is a breath of fresh air. The media could do much to help our nation’s economic situation by accentuating the positive.

Adding to that thought, the author has done research into why many Americans think the stimulus isn’t working, and then offers a solid debunking of it.

Speaking of debunking the falsehoods out there about the stimulus, this great article has some cool graphics that show in pictures what cannot be explained in so many words. But first, something from my email bag that shows at a glance how the Obama administration has plugged the dike on job losses. I have heard this called “the bikini graph”:

An interesting point here is that the Bush Administration finished with a net loss of jobs over the entire eight years he was in office. He bragged so much about his job creation numbers. Nowadays, with all the revisionism from Bush and his cronies out there you don’t hear a peep from them bragging about his job numbers.

Obama’s stimulus has worked. See for yourself:

I applaud the New York Times. More time and effort should be devoted to spreading the word of the positive changes in our economy. It would do much to smooth over the prickly fear and hatred oozing from the radical right.

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