World News Korner

The next time that your conservative relatives start talking about how President Obama destroyed the economy, show them this.

Courtesy of the LA Times:

Amazingly, there are still some holdouts in the political and economic community who insist that the Obama stimulus failed--that is, failed to arrest a steep fall in economic output and launch a period of growth in gross domestic product, jobs, stock market valuations, and other metrics that continues to this day.

Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin and Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard (and a former Clinton administration economics advisor) have just ganged up on the stimulus deniers. Their analyses are timely, since the stimulus has just passed its fifth birthday: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009.

Chinn observes (and shows his work via a series of telling slides) that the launch of ARRA coincides almost exactly with the bottoming out of the stock market, the reversal of a trend of increasing negative GDP growth and an almost unbroken record of positive growth since the end of the first quarter of 2009.

"The burden of proof," he writes, "lies on those who assert the beginning of the recovery is due to anything, anything (Fed balance sheet expansion, TARP — both implemented six months earlier –, sunspots, or the return of Ancient Aliens) but the policies implemented by the Obama Administration."

I have heard a number of so-called "economists" on Fox News and CNN claiming that the stimulus did nothing, but all evidence proves their contention incorrect.

History will prove that what President Obama did to save the economy was just this side of miraculous, until then it falls to good liberals to right the good fight of facts against purposeful misinformation.

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