Today, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers claimed the Administration always knew the stimulus would be slow to take effect.
ROMER: “We always knew we were not going to get all that much fiscal impact during the first five to six months. The big impact starts to hit from about now onwards.”
The rhetoric being used the past few months, however, has typically claimed the stimulus has been or should have been working long before now:
Back in February, with Congress moving swiftly to approve President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, White House budget director Peter Orszag said the benefits of the stimulus would be “take weeks to months” to be felt.
Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, was even more optimistic: “You’ll see the effects begin almost immediately,” Summers told CNN in February.
Just last month, Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, joined administration officials in asserting that the stimulus was already working, despite rising unemployment rates.
“The idea here is that, yes, the unemployment rate is rising, but it would be rising more quickly [without the bill],” Bernstein said on ABCNews.com’s “Top Line.” “We’re spending about $1 billion a day — and, by the way, with very careful oversight — and that’s creating, again, economic activity that would not have occurred in the absence of this plan. That’s the essential point.”
The stimulus has been a fiscal disaster for American taxpayers. Democrats rammed the package through Congress without any fear of consequences, and we see now that they had no idea whether or not it would ever have any effect on the economy. It’s a bill laden with pork and nothing to help the economy.