About the author: Michael Grunwald, a former Washington Post reporter, is a senior national correspondent at Time magazine and the author of “The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era.”
President Obama’s February 2009 stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was a political disaster. It helped fuel the Republican revival of 2010 and now stars in Mitt Romney’s ads. The president even stopped uttering the word “stimulus.” But the $787 billion bill was one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in modern history. It was the purest distillation of what Obama meant by change, transforming our approaches to energy, education, health care, transportation and the economy, promoting long-term reinvestment as well as short-term recovery. Just about everything Americans think they know about it is wrong. Here are a few examples.
1. The stimulus didn’t create jobs.
2. The stimulus was full of waste, pork and fraud.
3. The stimulus should have been much bigger.
It’s true that a bigger stimulus would have provided a bigger economic jolt and accelerated the sluggish recovery...the bill needed 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a Republican filibuster, and the three GOP moderates who supported it insisted that it couldn’t exceed $800 billion. So did at least half a dozen centrist Democrats, including Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mary Landrieu (La.). Everyone involved in the negotiations — including liberals who favored a larger stimulus — agrees that Obama got as much as he could get.
4. Unlike the New Deal, the stimulus will leave no legacy.
5. The stimulus showed that Obama can’t legislate.
Full explanations:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-obamas-stimulus/2012/08/10/7935341e-e176-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_singlePage.html
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Five myths about Obama’s stimulus (Original post)
MannyGoldstein (21,415 posts) 
