I don't like these kinds of stories -- Sides split on success of stimulus -- because it spends too much time with what politicians and polls are saying and not enough on the actual independent analysis. It's no surprise that Democrats will say the stimulus is working and that the GOP will say it's been a failure, as only two current Republicans voted for the measure in either house of the U.S. Congress. If we ask the question without the political lens, we'd focus more on what the independent Congressional Budget Office says (that between 900,000 to 2.4 million jobs were created or saved), as well as other independent sources. TARP and other programs that were championed by the Bush and Obama administrations, combined with the stimulus, helped steer us away from a depression. That's no small feat, and it's too bad neither administration is getting credit for making such incredibly important but wildly unpopular decisons simply because they were the right thing to do.
It's important to pull back from the politics because how we view what happened in this instance will color how we respond to similar economic crises in the future. What's also important to note is that the stimulus was another large bipartisan package that passed on a partisan vote. Roughly a third of the package was tax cuts of a wide variety. The rest was set for various spending and infrastructure projects and patching the tax code a bit. In other words, if Democrats and Republicans weren't at each other's throats, both sides could claim success for their view of how to pull us out of a recession that almost became a depression. What is still unknowable is what will the actual long-term effects from the $787 billion stimulus package will be, as well as how much did it teach us about trying to avoid this kind of situation again.
