The leading economic forecasters all believe that at its peak the stimulus added about 2-4% to GDP, the difference between contraction and growth, and saved or created about 2.5 million jobs. (\u201cSaved or created\u201d has become a punchline\u2014Obama joked after his annual Thanksgiving pardon that he had just saved or created four turkeys\u2014but it simply means the economy would\u2019ve had 2.5 million less jobs without the stimulus.) Early empirical studies have overwhelmingly confirmed the Recovery Act\u2019s positive effects. And the anti-stimulus approach is flailing in Europe, where austerity in tough times has led to double-dip recessions in Great Britain and Spain.<\/p>\n
But the Recovery Act did not just blast money into the economy willy-nilly. It also financed enormous investments in Obama\u2019s agenda, a major down payment on the campaign promises that the media ignored while obsessing about his race and his pastor and the ads comparing him to Paris Hilton.<\/p>\n
For starters, the stimulus was by far the largest energy bill in history, pouring a mind-boggling $90 billion into clean energy when we had been spending just a few billion dollars a year. It included unprecedented investments in wind, solar, and other renewables; energy efficiency in every form; a smarter grid; electric vehicles; advanced biofuels; and the factories to build all that green stuff in the U.S. The clean energy industry was on the brink of death after the financial collapse of 2008, but thanks to the stimulus, U.S. generation of renewable power has doubled under Obama. The stimulus is building the world\u2019s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world\u2019s largest solar farms, and the nation\u2019s first refineries for cellulosic biofuels. It created an advanced battery industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch, financing 30 new factories. And it launched a research agency called ARPA-E, modeled on the Pentagon\u2019s DARPA unit that pioneered the Internet and GPS technology, that\u2019s already creating the clean-energy breakthroughs of tomorrow.<\/p>\n
As they say in the infomercials, that\u2019s not all.<\/p>\n