The Long Road Back

Five years later, the White House makes the case that the stimulus worked

When President Obama signed his $800 billion stimulus bill five years ago, the U.S. economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month and contracting at a Depression-level rate. "I don't want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems," he said then. "But today does mark the beginning of the end." The stimulus quickly became a national joke, mocked by the right as a massive boondoggle and by the left as a pathetic pittance. A year after it passed, the percentage of Americans who believed it had created jobs was lower than the percentage of Americans who believed Elvis...

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