Lee Terry, on twitter:
A year later, the stimulus bill still hasn’t helped the private sector. http://omaha.com/article/20100217/AP09
David Leonhardt at the New York Times:
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.
And Ezra Klein at The Washington Post:
The bill included $288 billion in tax cuts for individuals and corporations. If that money didn’t create even one new private-sector job, then the Republican belief in tax cuts requires some serious revision.
When I first saw Terry’s tweet, I assumed he was linking to a news story analyzing the impact of the stimulus on the economy. Instead, it’s just a story about Terry’s press conference in which he just claims that the stimulus hasn’t helped the private sector.
That’s his supporting evidence — his own press conference.
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/why_are_americans_so_mad_about_the_stimulus.php
I loved the BALLS he had posting that. I expected at LEAST a WSJ op-ed, but no, it was a story about Rep. Big Boy.
Talk of the Nation had an incredibly interesting and troubling look at who is being impacted most by the current recession.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103171928
Labor Underutilization Problems of U.S. Workers Across Household Income Groups at the End of the Great Recession: A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation’s Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent wrote:
The unemployment rates of workers in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009 varied extremely widely across the ten household income deciles.8 Workers in the lowest income decile faced a Great Depression type unemployment rate of nearly 31% while those in the second lowest income decile had an unemployment rate slightly below 20% (Table 3 and Chart 2). Unemployment rates fell steadily and steeply across the ten income deciles. Workers in the top two deciles of the income distribution faced unemployment rates of only 4.0 and 3.2 percent respectively, the equivalent of full employment. The relative size of the gap in unemployment rates between workers in the bottom and top income deciles was close to ten to one. Clearly, these two groups of workers occupy radically different types of labor markets in the U.S.
Source: http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/Labor_Underutilization_Problems_of_U.pdf