Economic Stimulus Package | Stimulus Package Details | Stimulus

Is The Economic Stimulus Package Working?

“Is the economic stimulus package working” seems to be the question on most people’s minds.

But which economic stimulus package are you talking about?

Bear Sterns was taken over by JP Morgan Chase, so maybe that $29 billion economic stimulus plan worked.

We all got our economic stimulus checks in 2008, but we didn’t necessarily put them back into the economy, so that $178 billion might not have been well-spent.

The $300 billion mortgage stimulus, “Hope For Homeowners,” awarded in July 2008 didn’t work very well either, because few people took an interest in the program. While proponents of this particular economic stimulus package estimated that 400,000 homeowners could be helped over a three-year period, in the first month, only 111 had applied.

The $200 billion economic stimulus handout to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants, stabilized them enough to prevent collapse.

The $50 billion economic stimulus to stabilize money market funds might have averted a disaster.

The $150 billion doled out to AIG, the insurance giant, prevented their closure, but must not have completely solved the problem since AIG came back for $30 billion more less than six months later, even as they were awarding $165 million in bonuses to their top executives.

The $25 billion given to the Big 3 automakers, Chrysler, Ford, and GM, allowed them to live to see another day, but they remain on the brink of disaster.

The $700 billion bank bailout, given in extreme haste in October 2008, might have kept the banks functioning, but no one really knows where that money went or what was done with it, so it’s hard to judge whether TARP is working.

And that was just the economic stimulus packages of 2008.

As for 2009, it’s too soon to tell whether the $787 billion job creation and tax cut stimulus, the $275 billion mortgage stimulus, and the $1 trillion “toxic assets” purchase programs are working.

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