Steve Benen points out the obvious:
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE STEPS ALL OVER BOEHNER’S MESSAGE…. In his exceedingly silly speech on the economy today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) proudly proclaimed, “All this ‘stimulus’ spending has gotten us nowhere.”
And almost immediately thereafter, the CBO made Boehner look pretty foolish.
The oft-criticized stimulus plan boosted the economy in the second quarter by as much as 4.5%, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.
In a report published the same day as Minority Leader John Boehner’s criticism of President Obama’s economic policy, the CBO said the stimulus law boosted the economy by between 1.7% and 4.5%, lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.
This seems pretty significant, so let’s look at it from a few different angles.
First, as a real-world matter, economic growth was pretty slow in the second quarter (April to June), but the CBO report makes clear that without the stimulus, it wouldn’t have grown at all. In other words, a stimulus helped lead to tepid growth — the absence of a stimulus would have been significant economic contraction.
Second, this CBO data, like reports from the Council of Economic Advisors and the Office of Management and Budget, should effectively end the debate about whether the Recovery Act did what it set out to do. The stimulus effort was too small — criticism from conservative Republicans is completely backwards — but as designed, it was intended to give the economy a significant boost, and save and create millions of jobs. It did exactly that. Anyone who argues otherwise is either not paying attention or is being willfully dishonest.
Willful dishonesty is a feature, not a bug, of the modern GOP.
