Perry says stimulus didn’t create jobs; CBO says it did

Reuters - Texas Governor Rick Perry, front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, said on Monday President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus program created “zero” jobs.

Not so, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan budget arbiter for lawmakers.

Congress in 2009 passed the $830 billion economic stimulus, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included both spending measures and tax cuts.

According to the CBO:

• As of June, between 1 million and 2.9 million Americans owed their jobs to the recovery act.
• In the second quarter of 2011 the recovery act added or preserved 550,000 full-time jobs.
• The recovery act brought down the unemployment rate by between 0.5 and 1.6 percentage points in the second quarter of 2011.

The Texas governor, who has touted his jobs creation record, gave his assessment of the U.S. economic stimulus program during Monday’s CNN/Tea Party sponsored Republican candidates debate in Tampa, Florida.