Sunday, July 26, 2009

Joe's Jolts   [Jonathan Adler]

Today Vice President Joe Biden argues that the stimulus bill is misunderstood.  He writes: "The act was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period — not a jolt that would last only a few months." Yet as Mark Silva reports:

As recently as June, at a roundtable in New York, Biden called the Recovery Act "an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start.''

In March, the vice president said ''the Recovery Act, as we call it, provides a necessary jolt to our economy to implement what we refer as 'shovel-ready' projects.''

And in November, as a new White House in planning was assembling its new economic team, President-elect Barack Obama said: "The most important thing to recognize is that we have a consensus, which is pretty rare, between conservative economists and liberal economists, that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape and that is focused on the 2.5 million jobs that I intend to create during the first part of my administration. We have to put people back to work."

07/26 10:17 AMShare