Today marked the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s economic stimulus law. But based on the reaction from Capitol Hill, there was little reason to celebrate. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) held a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday morning with Heritage’s J.D. Foster, George Mason University economics professor Russell …
In an op-ed from last week, Paul Krugman again called for greater government control of the economy to combat unemployment writing: “A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to …
It doesn’t matter who asks the question (CNN, Gallup, Pew, Fox, ABC, or CBS) the answer is always the same: the American people believe President Barack Obama’s $814 billion economic stimulus failed. The White House believes that this is a failure of communications not a failure of policy. Enter newly …
Earlier this week, Maya MacGuineas, a fiscal policy expert at the New America Foundation, ranked Congress’s options in addressing the pending expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. A little more than two months remain before an automatic tax hike on all American earners sets in, and Congress has …
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf recently testified before the Senate Budget Committee on policies that might give the economy a helpful lift in the near term. Congress is right to be concerned. But for an inventory surge last winter, the economy remains stuck in low gear at about …
Reducing budget deficits by cutting government spending has a stronger record of economic stimulus than either reducing the deficit with tax increases or increasing government spending. That’s what Harvard economists Albert Alesina and Silvia Ardagna have found in their recent research. They examined 107 instances of large reductions (at least …
By now it’s obvious that the government’s “stimulus” spending spree has failed to achieve its intended results—just as critics of Keynesian economic theory predicted. Compounding the policy blunder is the failure of officials to properly vet some of the costly public works projects. Case in point is the $7.2 billion …
When President Barack Obama was selling his economic stimulus plan to the American people, he promised that, if enacted, the legislation would prevent unemployment from rising above 8%. $3 billion in Cash for Clunkers bailouts, $10 billion in government union bailouts, $16 billion in Medicaid bailouts, $13 billion in home …
The immediate effects of Obama’s policies are easily seen. We can observe the workers of which billions of dollars have been spent to employ. We are aware of the entitlement checks given by the pen stroke of congress. It is inferred that the recovery plan actually recovers. However, Obama’s legislative …
