Republicans Hate America So Much They're Angry the Stimulus is Working

Sadly for Republicans, the Stimulus Stimulated

"You can fool some of the people some of the time, and that's our target market." Judging from the rhetoric of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), that's the Republican mantra when it comes to the Obama recovery package. Nine months after Boehner wrongly decried a "stimulus bill that didn't create any jobs," his web site crowed about a Pew Research Survey showing "Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe the $787 billion stimulus package the president passed last year has helped create jobs." Unfortunately for John Boehner and the myth-makers of the GOP, the numbers show not only that the stimulus stimulated, but, as the Wall Street Journal acknowledged, the "economic effect of the stimulus [was] bigger than projected."

That's the word from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The inescapable conclusion of the program's success is detailed in the CBO's assessment of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) for the first quarter of 2010. As the Journal summed it up:

The $800 billion U.S. stimulus package has had a slightly bigger effect on the U.S. economy than was projected when it was passed more than a year ago, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Tuesday.

Through the first quarter of 2010, the stimulus boosted employment by an estimated 1.3 million to 2.8 million jobs, about a quarter or half million more than projected. Gross domestic product was 1.7 to 4.1 percentage points higher than it would have been without the stimulus, the nonpartisan budget office said.

Harkening back to President Obama's promise that ARRA would save or create 3.5 million jobs, the CBO projects that as many as "3.7 million American jobs could be attributed to the Recovery Act by the end of the September." As the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen put it, "There's a word to describe a recovery effort like this: success."

Republicans can always try running on the immigrants are hiding under your bed platform. Or they could promise to repeal the stimulus and take away those jobs because they didn't like Obama repairing the damage they worked so hard to cause for eight years. Or they could just run as the bed wetting fear mongers that conjured up those imaginary WMDs in Iraq. The possibilities are endless. Well, except Republicans in 2010 and 2012 will not run on ideas and solutions because as usual they don't have any.