Still not true: All economists did not support the stimulus
Continuing his pattern of repeating debunked claims, President Obama alluded to a consensus among economists on the stimulus package during the State of the Union address:
The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act. (Applause.) That’s right -– the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus bill. (Applause.) Economists on the left and the right say this bill has helped save jobs and avert disaster.
The president told the Washington Post in July 2009 that all economists agreed:
The reason that it hasn’t been at the forefront of my agenda is because I walked in when we were about to slip into the Great Depression — or the next Great Depression. And so I had to start off, coming out of the box, with a recovery package that, whatever arguments may be made by the critics at this point, there was no economist out there who thought we didn’t need to do, and a portion of that was just stabilization funds for states and tax cuts that were uncontroversial.
From the beginning, economists were split. The Cato Institute ran full-page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post with a statement signed by some 300 economists against the Recovery Act.
And Cato isn’t being quiet after the State of the Union:
At the outset of the economic downturn, Cato ran an ad in the nation’s largest newspapers in which more than 300 economists (Nobel laureates among them) signed a statement saying a massive government spending package was among the worst available options. Since then, Cato economists have published dozens of op-eds in major news outlets poking holes in big-government solutions to both the financial system crisis and the flagging economy.
You can check out Cato’s op-eds here.
Sources:
The White House, Jan. 27, 2010
Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address
Cato @ Liberty, Jan. 28, 2010
The Washington Post, July 22, 2009
The Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2009
