CBO: 600,000 To 1.6 Million Employed By Stimulus

Wall St Journal:

The Congressional Budget Office late Monday said it estimates that the federal stimulus package sustained between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs in the third quarter, and raised gross domestic product by 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points higher than it would have been without the program.

The CBO said the figures were estimates made "using evidence about how previous similar policies have affected the economy and various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy."

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, in a blog post, said stimulus recipients have reported that about 640,000 jobs "were created or retained" with stimulus funding through Sept. 30. "However, such reports do not provide a comprehensive estimate of the law's impact on employment in the United States. That impact may be higher or lower than the reported number for several reasons (in addition to any issues about the quality of the data in the reports)," Mr. Elmendorf wrote ...

"Economic output and employment in the spring and summer of 2009 were lower than CBO had projected at the beginning of the year. But in CBO's judgment, that outcome reflects greater-than-projected weakness in the underlying economy rather than lower-than-expected effects" of the stimulus, according to Mr. Elmendorf's blog post.