Impact of the Economic Stimulus Program

The economic stimulus program (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009–ARRA) is estimated to have the following nontrivial impacts by the independent CBO.  Thus it should have been much larger and not smaller, as some have suggested.

…CBO [Congressional Budget Office] estimates that in the second quarter of calendar year 2010, ARRA’s policies:

Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,

Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,

Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and

Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

via Director’s Blog » Blog Archive » Estimated Impact of the Stimulus Package on Employment and Economic Output.