Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Stimulus Accountability
as Professor Mankiw has said, there is nothing that can happen that would cause stimulus advocates to confirm that the stimulus law did not create jobs. Even, for example, if employment gains were promised for all 50 states, yet only 1 state saw employment rise after the stimulus.
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2 comments:
This is not entirely an empirical issue. You need a *theory* of what would have happened to employment in the absence of stimulus and then compare that result with the actual data. Problem is we don't all agree on the appropriate theory. But I keep going back to the original predictions of Team Obama about what the level of unemployment would have been now without the stimulus. We are higher than that! One possible implication is that the stimulus has done harm.
Mario Rizzo
Hi Casey,
I'm a third year undergraduate student at Columbia and I was a little confused by the data presented in this article. I was reading the original proposal at http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf
which indicates that most(90%) of the projected jobs were in private industries.
However, this page http://www.republicans.waysandmeans.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=150826 judges the success of the stimulus package by comparing the projected numbers against state payroll data.
If I understand this correctly, might they be making an apples to oranges comparison? What does the data say for all payrolls?
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