The stimulus accomplished its mission of jump starting economic recovery.  Let’s stop arguing about it and worry about what we do next to sustain the recovery. One-third of the stimulus was designed to be spent quickly. It was and the impact on economic growth is now tapering off quickly. The other two-thirds was simply additions to existing public budgets spread out over the next few years to be spent long after the economy had been stimulated into recovery.

The proper way to estimate stimulus jobs is to make GDP estimates with and without the stimulus in an econometric model. Countless models have done this and have come to the same conclusion. Stimulus spending provided a big boost to the economy in the spring and summer quarters and added 500,000 to 1,000,000 jobs. The federal government operating perhaps a dozen econometric models which all reach this conclusion.  The Chairman of the …