The CBO On The Stimulus

There will be long term costs to it - on interest on the debt - but the Obama stimulus seems to have done much better than almost anyone expected:

CBO estimates that in the first quarter of calendar year 2010, ARRA’s policies:

• Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,
• Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,
• Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and 
• Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

The effects of ARRA on output and employment are expected to increase further during calendar year 2010 but then diminish in 2011 and fade away by the end of 2012.