Crossposted from Main Street, the blog of Working America.
This recession was years in the making, but some of President Obama’s critics want us to believe that because he didn’t eliminate unemployment at the snap of his fingers, his policies—especially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—aren’t working.
A couple days ago, the New York Times gave us a this person vs. that person report: members of the Obama administration say the recovery act is creating jobs, while the usual suspects say it is the worst thing EVER.
There is still a lot that’s unknown about how the president’s policies are working—and we can’t know how bad things would have gotten without the actions he took. But it’s not just he said/he said, either.
That’s why I want to look at another set of information on this. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did a study looking at the impact of the stimulus on the budgets of New York and Virginia. These states are a great source of information because both had large projected budget shortfalls, and both had proposed budgets established before the recovery act was passed. The budgets they actually ended up with, then, which came after they had received significant federal aid, show us where cuts that were already planned got uncut.
The bottom line? In Virginia, the recovery funds closed 37% of the shortfall, and in New York, 31%.
A few of the specifics for Virginia:
- Enabled the state to retain its funding for some 13,000 non-teaching school personnel — such as janitors, psychologists, and administrative assistants — that the governor had proposed eliminating.
- Allowed the state to reduce its planned cut to state colleges and universities from $296 million to approximately $169 million(not taking into account other smaller changes enacted by the legislature), lessening the need for tuition increases.
- Prevented closure of three hospitals and treatment centers serving persons with mental health needs.
- Averted a proposed cut in aid to local sheriffs’ departments.
For details on these cuts, go to the CBPP report. But note that it’s not just that people with mental health needs, including 844 children and adolescents, would have gone without care and maybe ended up in juvenile detention facilities rather than getting the treatment they needed—what would have happened to the staff of those hospitals? We’re talking about both services and jobs, in other words.
In New York, the funds:
- Averted $1 billion in planned health care cuts.
- Reversed a sweeping cut to K-12 education aid for the 2009-2010 school year.
- Averted proposed cuts to community college funding.
- Averted proposed eligibility restrictions for a college tuition assistance program for low- and moderate-income New York residents.
Here we see strongly how this budget shortfall could have affected a generation of New Yorkers by leaving them without access to the education they’ll need to thrive in and contribute to the economy for the rest of their lives.
We can’t know everything, and in an economy that’s still bad, with working people still suffering, there are going to continue to be a lot of fingers pointing in a lot of directions. That’s why it’s important to look at the evidence we have, to figure out as best we can what’s working and where we can keep doing better.