WASHINGTON — President Obama billed it as an adrenaline jolt -- a $787-billion stimulus package that not only would put people back to work, but also underwrite construction and energy projects the country had long neglected.
But with the economy still sputtering and some experts doubting the program was meeting its goals, Obama vowed Monday to accelerate stimulus spending with the goal of creating or saving 600,000 jobs by summer's end.
Opening a meeting with Cabinet members and Vice President Joe Biden, Obama sought to claim substantial progress while holding down expectations.
"We've done more than ever, faster than ever, more responsibly than ever, to get the gears of the economy moving again," Obama said, and "we're in a position to really accelerate." Still, he acknowledged that job losses -- while lower than expected in May -- remained high. "We're still in the middle of a very deep recession," he said, and "it's going to take a considerable amount of time for us to pull out."
Results of the stimulus spending are difficult to measure, and so far the promised federal money has been slow in coming. As of May 29, just over 100 days since Obama signed the bill into law, only about 6% of the funds had been spent.
And on the jobs front, an early target was missed: Two of the president's top economic advisors put out a report Jan. 9 predicting that with the stimulus spending, the U.S. unemployment rate this year would not exceed 8%. It now stands at 9.4%. That figure is higher than Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein had said it would be even if the stimulus package had not been adopted.
"A lot of this is hokum. All along, [Obama's] job numbers have kept changing according to the political environment," said Peter Morici, a professor of international business at the University of Maryland.
Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, put it even more bluntly: "The actual unemployment rate is worse than their baseline -- suggesting that their stimulus plan was harmful. And yet, despite that, they're asserting it has been successful. That shows an incredible amount of gall."
Guesstimates
Obama has said the stimulus package has saved or created 150,000 jobs already and continues to pay off. Those numbers appear to be elastic, though: On a Sunday-morning news show, his senior advisor David Axelrod said the plan "has produced hundreds of thousands of jobs."
