Despite Vice-President Biden’s claim, the reality shows that, despite costing more than the administration expected, the stimulus still hasn’t created the jobs they promised.
CLAIM: Democrats assert stimulus failed because Republicans kept it small.
Democrats repeatedly promised their massive 2009 stimulus plan would create over 3 million new jobs. It hasn’t. Instead, unemployment climbed to 10 percent as over 2 million more jobs were eliminated. This weekend Vice President Biden took the extraordinary step of suggesting stimulus failed because Republicans made it “too small”:
TAPPER: Was the stimulus, in retrospect, too small?
BIDEN: Look, there’s a lot of people at the time argued it was too small. Actually, we…
TAPPER: A lot of people in your administration.
BIDEN: — yes. A lot of people in our administration, a lot of — I mean, you know, even some Republican economists and some Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small. But, you know, there was a reality. In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes. And we found three — three. And we finally got it passed. So there is the reality of whether or not the Republicans are willing to play, whether or not the Republicans are just about repeal and repeat the old policies or they’re really wanting to do something. And I — I’m not — I’m not — you know…
TAPPER: So if you didn’t have Republicans that you had — if you didn’t have the legislative reality…
BIDEN: I think what…
TAPPER: — it would have been bigger?
BIDEN: I think it would have been bigger. I think it would have been bigger. In fact, what we offered was slightly bigger than that…
FACTS: Democrats’ stimulus bill failed on its own merits, not because – at $862 billion or nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. – it was “too small.”
- During the debate leading up to passage of the stimulus bill, Jared Bernstein (Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Biden) and Christina Romer (Chair, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors) argued that “A package in the range that the President-Elect has discussed is expected to create between three and four million jobs by the end of 2010…We have assumed a package just slightly over the $775 billion currently under discussion.”
- That $775 billion assumed cost was actually LESS than what CBO estimated the Democrats’ stimulus plan would cost when it was signed into law ($787 billion), which CBO later revised upwards (to $862 billion).
- Thus the failure of stimulus to create jobs cannot be because it spent too little – since actual stimulus spending is MORE than the level Administration economists said would “create between three and four million jobs.”