The Stimulus Worked

In fact it saved our butts.

The scary part is that this Republicon Regressionary Recession cost us 16% of GDP, whereas the last Deregulatory GOPster Debacle the S&L Crisis only cost us 6% of GDP. Meaning that the Cons have gotten almost three times more effective at fucking things up in the last 30 years. We're listing to starboard now, one more turn at the tiller from these guys and and we'll capsize!

Check this out: http://mydd.com/2010/7/28/the-blinder-zandi-report?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mydd+%28MyDD%29

EXCERPTS:
A paper by economists Alan Blinder, (McCain advisor) an economist at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve , and Mark Zandi, (Clinton advisor) the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, finds that without the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out the nation's financial sector, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama Administration’s fiscal stimulus program - the much maligned American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) - the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

Additionally, Dr. Blinder and Dr. Zandi find that the US economy would have lost an additional 8.5 million jobs, on top of the more than 8 million lost so far; and the economy would be in the midst of a deflationary asset spiral, instead of low inflation. Overall, they conclude that the aggregate effects of the TARP and the ARRA "probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0."

Mr. Blinder and Mr. Zandi emphasize the sheer size of the fallout from the financial crisis. They estimate the total direct cost of the recession at $1.6 trillion, and the total budgetary cost, after adding in nearly $750 billion in lost revenue from the weaker economy, at $2.35 trillion, or about 16 percent of G.D.P.

By comparison, the savings and loan crisis cost about $350 billion in today’s dollars: $275 billion in direct cost and an additional $75 billion from the recession of 1990-91 — or about 6 percent of G.D.P. at the time.