The Stimulus Is Still Working

Michael Grunwald discusses his new book on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:

[A]fter the financial crisis, everyone knew it wasn’t going to turn around quickly. That changes the rules on timely, targeted and temporary. You’re not worried about overheating the economy if it didn’t spend out in six months. So what they did was [give] aid to states to prevent layoffs, which went out right away. Food stamps to get money into people’s pockets. And then other stuff, the infrastructure, the clean energy, the health IT — that was understood to take longer. But even there, take wind energy, which obviously it takes awhile to get a wind farm going. By the end of 2008, that industry was dead in the water. The day after the stimulus passed, one of the major wind companies, which was pulling out of America entirely, turned around and announced a $6 billion investment in the United States.

Health IT is another example I love. That’s one of the few where even they would admit there was no pretense of stimulus. The money didn’t go out the door till 2011. But right now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health IT is America’s fastest growing industry.