New Report: Recovery Act Created Up to 3.3 Million Jobs

August 25, 2010 – AFL-CIO NOW! Blog - By Mike Hall

While the nation’s job crisis continues, it would be far worse if Republican congressional leaders had been successful in blocking the economic recovery act.

A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act put 1.4 million to 3.3 million people to work in the second quarter of this year and lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percent.

Read the full CBO report here.

Vice President Joe Biden says the CBO report:

is further confirmation of what we’ve been hearing from leading economists, the nation’s governors and families across the country: The Recovery Act is working to rescue the economy from eight years of failed economic policy and rebuild it even stronger than before.

Read Biden’s full statement here.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), House minority leader of the party that’s said “NO!” to every attempt in the past two years to get the economy back on track for working families, continues to rant and rave.

In a speech in Cleveland yesterday, he spewed a string of phony claims about the recovery act and other Obama administration economic initiatives. The spin wasn’t surprising, but the scary part was his promise to return to the Wall Street-friendly, tilt-toward-the-rich economic blueprint of the Bush years if Republicans take control of Congress after the fall elections.

Yikes!

Click here for a fact check on Boehner’s rant.