White House says stimulus plan worked Oct 1 06:04 PM US/Eastern Comments (0) Email to a friend Share on Facebook Tweet this Bookmark and Share US Vic

White House says stimulus plan worked
Oct 1 06:04 PM US/Eastern
Comments (0) Email to a friend Share on Facebook Tweet this Bookmark and Share

US Vice President Joe Biden speaks during The Public Safety Officer Medal o...

The White House defended its 800 billion dollar stimulus plan Friday, insisting the mammoth effort was a success despite Republican criticism and division among the public about its efficacy.

Vice President Joe Biden, who is charged with implementing the law, delivered a new report which found that the act was on schedule and was being put into force with a lower-than-expected amount of fraud and waste.

The stimulus plan has become a millstone around the necks of Democratic candidates in November's mid-term elections, as Republicans appear to have successfully stigmatized the legislation by claiming it did not work.

"We continue to show consistent progress on your commitment to create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of calendar year 2010," Biden said in a letter accompanying the report.

"In its most recent report, the Congressional Budget Office indicated that through June 30th, 2010, up to 3.3 million jobs had been created or saved.

The report showed that 70 percent of funds under the Recovery Act, passed last year, had gone out by Thursday with 308 billion dollars paid out in stimulus spending and 243 billion dollars in tax cuts.

The survey also said that less than 0.2 percent of all stimulus awards to various countrywide projects had been hit by active fraud investigations -- well below the average for government spending programs.

Republicans, seeking big gains in November's congressional polls, slammed the stimulus plan as soon as it passed, claiming it did not work, did not create jobs and did little but run up the already bloated US budget deficit.

"The administration predicted that unemployment wouldn't rise above eight percent if the trillion-dollar stimulus became law," said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

"We know how that turned out: unemployment, now at 9.6 percent, has hovered near double digits since the stimulus passed; we took on an additional trillion dollars in debt, and Americans? confidence in the administration's economic arguments never recovered."

Polling has shown widespread public skepticism over the stimulus plan. A USA Today/Gallup poll in August showed 43 percent of Americans approved of the act and 52 percent of those asked disapproved of it.

However key administration officials argued that they had never said that the stimulus plan would be sufficient to compensate for the lost growth of the worst economic recession since the 1930s Great Depression.

"There is no conceivable stimulus package that could fully offset these losses," said Jared Bernstein, Biden's chief economist.

The Republican Party in the House of Representatives has pledged to act immediately to block unspent stimulus funds from the Recovery Plan if they are elected to a majority in November's mid-term polls.

But adminstration officials said that such a step would cost jobs, halt projects already under way, reduce the impact of the stimulus plan in promoting growth and would involve the cancellation of legally approved contracts.

"The idea that it is possible at any level not to spend Recovery Act funds beggars the imagination," said Ed DeSeve, an Obama advisor charged with enacting the stimulus plan.