Hope and Fail

Now Biden says stimulus wasn’t meant to, you know, stimulate

Veep Joe Biden argues in The New York Times that the stimulus package wasn't meant to give a jolt to the economy.

Perhaps following the president’s lead, Veep Joe Biden today argues in The New York Times that the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February wasn’t meant to “jolt” the economy.

Notwithstanding this progress, the nature of the Recovery Act remains misunderstood by many, and misconstrued by others: critics have suggested that the entire $787 billion is being spent on pet programs. As the person leading the administration’s efforts to put the Recovery Act into effect, I want to set the record straight.

… The care with which we are carrying out the provisions of the Recovery Act has led some people to ask whether we are moving too slowly. But the act was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period — not a jolt that would last only a few months.

Disregarding Biden’s previous statement that the White House “misread” the economy, Biden is clearly on record that the stimulus packages was, in fact, supposed to give the economy a boost.

From The Swamp:

As recently as June, at a roundtable in New York, Biden called the Recovery Act “an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start.”

In March, the vice president said ”the Recovery Act, as we call it, provides a necessary jolt to our economy to implement what we refer as ‘shovel-ready’ projects.”

And in November, as a new White House in planning was assembling its new economic team, President-elect Barack Obama said: “The most important thing to recognize is that we have a consensus, which is pretty rare, between conservative economists and liberal economists, that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape and that is focused on the 2.5 million jobs that I intend to create during the first part of my administration. We have to put people back to work.

(Note that the links in The Swamp’s post all point back to the White House.)

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