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The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the arm of the government that acts as an impartial judge of our government numbers, had this to say today:

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), also known as the economic stimulus package, certain recipients of funds appropriated in ARRA (most grant and loan recipients, contractors, and subcontractors) are required to report the number of jobs they created or retained with ARRA funding after the end of each calendar quarter. The law also requires CBO to comment on those reported numbers. Today CBO released a report to satisfy that requirement.

And here is the result of our stimulus package so far this year:

Looking at recorded spending to date as well as estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law's impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies on the economy and using various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. On that basis, CBO estimates that in the first quarter of calendar year 2010, ARRA's policies:

* Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,
* Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,
* Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and
* Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

So...if you hear a pundit claim that the stimulus package was a waste of money and did not create jobs, just know that they are lying (or have not read this report). The fact of the matter is that although economies eventually heal themselves, the purpose of the stimulus package was to halt the slide into a depressive downward spiral, where consumers stop spending because the economy is sliding, which causes the economy to slide further, etc. By stepping in and helping to create demand, our government did exactly what it was supposed to do under these extreme circumstances.

Plain and simple, we got it right for once with this massive stimulus package. Just remember that there were no Republicans that voted for it, either. None.

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