Business columns: Why the stimulus fell short

last updated 8 January 2015

Michael Grabell

The New York Times

Sure, the government can create jobs, said Michael Grabell. “It just doesn’t often do it well.” That’s my takeaway from three years of reporting on the $840 billion stimulus plan. The program has undoubtedly done “a lot of good” since its launch in 2009: It’s a key reason we don’t have double-digit unemployment today. But we might have also had a strong recovery if funds had been targeted to projects with “the most bang for the buck” instead of scattered far and wide. Billions of stimulus dollars remained unspent for years because so-called “shovel-ready” projects weren’t actually ready, or because bureaucracies held projects up. Some worthy projects were rushed for no reason, leading to shoddy results. Success came when “the government could immediately send billions of dollars to contractors who were already in place for a project that had well-established plans,” such as nuclear cleanup at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Cash for Clunkers also took off, jump-starting the auto industry. So it’s wrong to say that the stimulus failed completely. But we need to learn our lesson about “which policies work and which don’t.”