White House Report: Stimulus Bill is on the Right Track

One of the most talked-about issues in the coming Midterm elections is the state economy. In fact, the votes for this election will be greatly influenced by how candidates will address the very sensitive issue of unemployment. During the past couple of months, there have been mostly negative feedbacks towards the stimulus program that was approved by President Obama more than a year ago. In fact, some sectors in society even tagged it as an ultimate failure. There are numerous criticisms as to why the stimulus was unable to live up to its expectations of creating and saving between 900,000 – 3.5 million jobs.

Despite the numerous and sometimes harsh criticisms, the White House now claims the $800 billion stimulus bill is still on tract in producing the targeted amount of jobs since it was passed in Congress. It was remembered that the stimulus bill was signed by Congress February of last year as a way to minimize the destructive effects of the economic recession and jumpstart the economy. The funds will be spent for the next ten years with the bulk of it on tax cuts and tax breaks. Its major goal was to increase consumer spending in order to also generate more jobs.

But critics most especially Republicans said that the bill was ineffective and was only able to come up with a very minimal number of jobs. They also cited the increasing national rate of unemployment which now stands at over 9.6%. In a report presented by Vice President Joe Biden to President Obama, he underlined the consistent progress of their commitment to create jobs that is slowly being achieved by the stimulus. He also added that taxes have been lowered in over 95 percent of working families.

The report also mentioned that about $300 billion has been spent for the continuity of unemployment benefits, government projects and various grants to states in order to avoid layoffs of public workers. Another $243 billion was allocated for tax cuts where business institutions and institutions will surely benefit. Also included in the funding was Obama’s “Making Work Pay” policy where it gives $400 worth of tax credit to individuals while $800 for couples. The office of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office also claims that the bill is credited to over 1.4 to 3.3 million jobs.

Also included in the report is the renewal this year of unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless and funding aid to state governments and local school boards. Other projects such as reforms in the transportation sector (high speed rail) and other research and development projects (Information Technology) were also in high note. What’s more impressive is that only 0.2 percent of stimulus projects were investigated for reasons of fraud. This number is significantly lower than typical federal programs.

But several Republicans have criticized various stimulus projects. For example, Sen. Tom Boburn pointed out dozens of unreasonable projects such as the $554,000 used to replace the windows of a visitor center in Mount St. Helens. The center was reportedly closed three years ago by the state government. Also, another $90,000 was used to replace a five-year-old stretch of sidewalk in an Oklahoma town that led to a ditch. But a report on Friday by the Commerce Depart indicated that there was a big increase in construction spending which helped to reverse the negative effects of the recession to the sector.