| It's the one-year anniversary of the stimulus bill, aka American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which every New Jersey Republican Congressman opposed and every Democrat supported. Rush Holt says "Everyone in Central New Jersey, whether they realize it or not, knows someone who would be out of job without the investments made in the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act." Frank Pallone says "The Recovery Act is putting New Jerseyans to work who have lost their jobs and continued to employ those, who without it, would have lost their jobs." The New York Times talked to independent economists and concludes "the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit."
But to me, we can see how a recovery has started -- and how far we have to go -- in this graph of job losses put out by Organizing for America:
On the one hand, you can see how the jobs losses stabilized and then improved under the Obama Administration. The problem is that to bring unemployment back down, we need years of positive job growth.
So when our Representatives follow through on their promises to continue fighting for us, they should look at this conclusion from the Times article:
The last year has shown - just as economists have long said - that aid to states and cities may be the single most effective form of stimulus.
It's too bad so much of the stimulus went to tax cuts that most people don't even realize they got. Still, all in all, the stimulus is a success and we have averted an even worse disaster. |
