The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with a price tag of $770 billion that ballooned to $830 billion, marked its five year anniversary earlier this year, at which point Vice President Joe Biden declared it a success. However, the numbers haven’t born that out.
In January 2009, the administration projected that passing the bill would bring unemployment to 5 percent by the end of 2013 and ensure that it didn’t surpass 8 percent. But the unemployment was at 8 and 9 percent for much of Obama’s first term. It reached 6.7 percent at the end of 2013 and 6.6 percent in January.
The Congressional Budget Office projected earlier this month that unemployment would be roughly the same by the end of 2014, and will drop to 5.8 percent by 2017.
The stimulus bill was sold largely in 2009 as an infrastructure program. But employment for construction has even declined by more than 500,000 workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statics. Just 10 percent of the stimulus money went to infrastructure, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Further, the nonpartisan Factcheck.org stated in June 2011 that “CBO’s high estimate is still short of the 3.5 million jobs that Obama had said would be created by the end of 2010, so it’s accurate to say the stimulus has failed to live up to initial expectations.”
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