Five years ago Monday, President Barack Obama visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, his $800 billion stimulus bill. At the time, the U.S. economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month. In the fourth quarter of 2008, it had contracted at an 8% annual rate, a Depression-level free fall.
We never spent all that much money on President Obama’s stimulus, and now we're spending almost nothing on it, and that's a shame, according to Paul Krugman. The most the nation ever spent on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which passed in 2009, amounted to 1.6 percent of the economy, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist wrote in a blog post Friday. And now most of the stimulus spending under that law is gone, Krugman noted.
Apparently that wasn't enough Obama praise for Morales, who requested more: "What about President Obama? What can you say, a positive that we don't often hear?"
President Barack Obama on Thursday called for spending at least $13 billion to launch a "new era" of high-speed passenger rail transportation, sparking competition among states and providing a potentially rich new market for rail equipment makers.