WASHINGTON — With the Obama administration under fire for what critics call unrestrained spending and polls showing the American public ambivalent about the impact of the stimulus plan, officials are pushing back, seeking to highlight the role played by their polices in fueling a recovery.
Vice President Joe Biden, making what the White House billed as a major speech Thursday, touted the impact of the $787 billion economic stimulus program in lifting the economy.
“The Recovery Act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy and changing the conversation about the economy in this country,” Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a research institution. “Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we are talking about the end of a recession.”
While some congressional Republicans and others remain dubious about the success of the stimulus plan, economists generally agree that the package has played a significant part in stabilizing the economy. They are less certain about how big the impact has been.
“It’s starting to play a role, helping us to have slightly positive rather than slightly negative GDP growth,” said Phillip Swagel, an assistant Treasury secretary in the Bush administration who is now a visiting professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “It’s a gigantic amount of fiscal stimulus, and anyone who tells you it has had no impact you should be skeptical of.”
IHS Global Insight, an economic consulting firm, estimates that the stimulus has increased 2009 gross domestic product about 1 percent over what it otherwise would have been, with the benefit almost entirely in the second half of the year.
The firm also forecasts that the package will, in total, result in around 2 million more jobs than otherwise would have existed at the end of 2010. That’s below the 3 million to 3.5 million jobs the Obama administration estimated the package would create or save.
Still, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s , said, “I don’t think it’s any accident that the economy has gone out of recession and into recovery at the same time stimulus is providing its maximum economic impact.”
