Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist, said Boehner was "just wrong" to call the $787 billion stimulus spending "a failure."
If there was no stimulus at all, Zandi said, unemployment would be at around 11.5% rather than 9.5%.
"I think if we had not had the stimulus, estimates put forward by the Congressional Budget Office are absolutely right: we'd have 2.5-3 million fewer jobs than we'd have today," he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing this morning.
What can, in fact, be said about the recovery act is that it wasn't big enough -- not that it failed. It worked very, very well to a point.
ht Ashby