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 Roberts, and Stanford University economics professor John Taylor. Jordan intentionally left two empty seats as placeholders for Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, architects of the $787 billion plan. Both declined to attend and Jordan turned down an offer from the …
The Obama administration released the first hard numbers on how many jobs their $787 billion stimulus package has created or saved on Recovery.gov today. The number: 30,383 jobs from roughly $16 billion worth of stimulus contracts awarded directly by federal agencies. Crunching the numbers, that comes to $533,000 per job “saved or created.” To put those 30,383 jobs in perspecitve, consider that the U.S. economy lost 263,000 net jobs just last month and has lost 3.6 million net jobs since President Barack Obama was sworn into office. But the administration …
Heritage senior tax policy analyst Curtis Dubay and macroeconomics policy analyst Karen Campbell have a new paper out analyzing The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan put out by Council of Economic Advisers president and vice president Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. Dubay and Campbell write: Romer and Bernstein estimate how much government spending and tax cuts will increase production, or gross domestic product (GDP). … Romer and Bernstein, however, rely on a model based on historical data that is not comparable to current economic conditions, because …
