Originally posted by psmith81992
I have to question your sources. While Obama inherited a mess, he made an even bigger mess his first 4 years. It was a disaster of epic proportions. I don't know where you got the idea that he saved 2-4 million jobs. The stimulus did nothing but further water down the dollar.
According to multiple independent economics analysts including the CBO.
3.3 million is the number they give.
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics and an advisor to John McCain's presidential campaign, working with former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder, pegged it at 2.7 million.
USAtoday article mentions economists at Goldman Sachs, IHS Global Insight, JPMorgan Chase and Macroeconomic Advisers, say the stimulus boosted gross domestic product.
Additionally, the US auto industry was certainly saved by Obama's first term bailout of them. Now they're healthy, but back then they were in great danger of collapsing and taking hundreds of thousands to millions of jobs with them- separate from the stimulus.
See, the economic crash basically made a... hole in the economy. Lack of jobs meant there were fewer businesses that needed help from other businesses which cost more jobs, and it was also hard to get loans at that point to help so some normally temporary problems got worse. Paying people to do jobs and such fills that hole, and it can go slowly, or it can be filled faster with things like the stimulus.
Before the economic stimulus hit, the economy was bleeding jobs rapidly. When the stimulus hit, that stopped, and reversed, but took time to heal.
Heck, one of the big arguments is whether it was big enough- 8.8 million was the amount lost, so preventing several millions from going with it was a bandage on a wound that'd already lost a lot of blood.
I will compare to other countries that took other tactics- England did economic austerity (i.e. cutting spending)... and they got double- and triple- digit recessions, and higher debts without the job growth we had. And more jobs means more taxes means easier to pay down, so long-term, it's really better to deal with these things faster.
Not spending just allows the bleeding to continue. It's like the Great Depression, where things stayed crap until the New Deal started, they began improving, the opponents put the Deal on pause, they got worse again, the Deal got re-started, and they continued to improve until the war.
Only in Obama's 6th year did he start to progress. But his first 5 can only be described as an unmitigated disaster.
If you look at the US unemployment and the amount of hiring in the country, it's steadily gone up consistently once recovery begins, with the only slight blips due to stuff like debt ceiling fights (which caused economic uncertainty which slows hiring- but still, small blips, it's been incredibly consistent).
Here, he's Gallup's Job Creation index. Says a lot in a very visible chart.
We've been on an upward hill almost Obama's entire run once the stimulus hit and the recession was ended- some bumps, but a solid trajectory better than most other countries hit.
Year 6 may be when we passed up where we were, but that's because we were digging ourselves out of a hole, and the stimulus was some of the biggest shovel loads that helped us do so. Obama was handed a crisis and had to start at the bottom of a big hole, but 'getting us out of the hole' is a big accomplishment in itself- possibly his biggest.
And did I mention that the initial economic hit was actually proportionally bigger than the Great Depression's in terms of money lost? Had nothing been done- not just stimulus but also bailout at the end of Bush's term, they made a great one-two punch- then it'd certainly been well over a decade before we'd get to where we are right now. Had we had the bailout but more stimulus, we'd probably have a not-too-healthy 7~8% unemployment rate instead of a very solid 5.5%. Worse, if austerity had been tried.
So yea, go stimulus, it helped, significantly.