The RNC launched an attack today against Joe Biden for his oversight of the $787 billion economic stimulus package that helped the U.S. recover from its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Republicans are once again trying to rewrite history and define the entire stimulus package as wasteful and ineffective. The RNC has obviously forgotten how the stimulus package guided our nation out of an economic disaster. Let’s remind them:
- The Stimulus “prevented 5.3 million people from slipping below the poverty line. It also improved nearly 42,000 miles of roads, repaired over 2,700 bridges, funded 12,220 transit vehicles, improved more than 3,000 water projects and provided tax cuts to 160 million American workers.” [Swampland, TIME, 2/17/14]
- Economic experts support the idea that “the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.” [IGM Forum,2/15/12]
- The Stimulus increased U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)* “by roughly 2 to 2.5 percentage points from late 2009 through mid-2011, keeping us out of a double-dip recession. It added about 6 million ‘job years’ (a full-time job for a full year) through the end of 2012.” [Swampland, TIME, 2/17/14] *GDP is used to gauge the health of a country’s economy by measuring the total dollar value of all goods and services produced in a country over a specific period of time.
- “The Congressional Budget Office, in a report released last year, said the law as of 2012 likely raised real GDP by between 0.1% and 0.8%, lowered the jobless rate between 0.1 and 0.6 percentage points, and boosted the number of employed people by between 200,000 and 1.1 million.” [Wall Street Journal, 2/17/14]