Issue of the week: Has the stimulus plan failed?

President Obama’s vaunted stimulus plan “did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy and a whole lot to stimulate the debt,” said Jeffrey H. Anderson in The Weekly Standard. The White House reported last week that its 2009 economic stimulus package, which has cost $667 billion so far, created or saved between 2.4 million and 3.6 million jobs. Computing from the lower figure, that means we paid an unconscionable $278,000 for each job created. “Taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead” if the government had simply cut 2.4 million checks for $100,000 and handed one over to each of these newly employed people. Even that doesn’t capture the full measure of the damage wrought. Since the start of the debate over the stimulus plan, the unemployment rate has risen from 7.3 percent to 9.1 percent, and the national debt rocketed from $9.986 trillion in 2008 to $14.467 trillion now. Some stimulus.

Now we know that stimulus spending is like dumping taxpayer money in a “leaky bucket,” said Hans Bader in OpenMarket​.org. Some does good while the rest goes to waste. It was inevitable that in the long run, the plan would weaken the recovery “by exploding the national debt and crowding out private investment.”

It’s nowhere near that simple, said Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. When assessing the impact of the stimulus, pointing out that unemployment remains high “is neither here nor there.” What’s important is “what would have happened otherwise.” Besides, the stimulus bill didn’t just fund new salaries, said Jake Tapper in ABCNews.com. It also went into building things, including new factories. So there’s a real case that “the math is flawed” when you simply divide the plan’s costs by the number of jobs it created.

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The stimulus made an obvious difference around here, said Erica Rodriguez in the Orlando Sentinel. Money from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act saved thousands of teaching jobs in Florida alone. “It also helped support struggling schools and provided a financial cushion during a statewide economic downturn and resulting budget crisis.” If you don’t believe the stimulus did any good, wait and see what happens to school districts now that the money is drying up.