Heresy

Sure the stimulus was too small. It wasn't focused enough on jobs. It wasted to much of it's girth on tax cuts that don't stimulate and economy. Tons of truly useful ideas were hacked out in the name of Ben Nelson and the Maine Senators looking like they were doing something. The bill still hasn't given us the free candy and blowjob we were explicitly promised.

Still, when it comes down to it, the bill that should have been better and our elected betters should have taken more seriously, largely did the job it was designed to do. Or should I say, did it's job as well as possible given the moronic confines the Senate placed on it. So sayeth economic experts.

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.
...
For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing.”

Acknowledging basic reality? Nariman my man, have you met this country or it's political leaders?

But there's a nice bit of news that while good, still doesn't make anyone feel better about the economy or it's prospects for the future. Somehow "When faced with the greatest economic crisis in our lifetimes, government struggled to enact a party line vote on a watered down measure that eventually ended up stemming the tide" doesn't engender Carnivale type celebrations. There's that.

And although our elected betters have seen the successes and learned from a rash of experts how the failure to make the bill big enough hindered making real headway into job and economic numbers, they're still going with small bore economic measures, cheap gamesmanship, obstruction, zero sum politics, lying, and minuscule bills in an attempt to address the jobs issue. Given a spot of good weather and large sections of the government growing a conscience, some of those bills might make it far enough to fall just short of getting the required votes to end a filibuster in the Senate. There's also that.

But hey, an additional 2 million of you would be unemployed and the economic numbers would still be flailing if not for the stimulus. I guess that's something.