Do you think the Obama stimulus plan has worked and how many new jobs were created?

It is difficult to quantify in broad numbers how many jobs were created or saved by the stimulus. The very nature of the economic spiral makes it so that at first mention the results can be fudged in favor or against the administration quite easily. Even the fact that the unemployment rate was at 7.2% at Obama's inauguration and is presently hovering at 10% is not a proper indicator to gauge the effectiveness of the stimulus.

Most of the stimulus money was distributed through the individual states. That makes proper quantification that much more difficult. So, how can one detremne its true effectiveness?

The purest way to analyze the true impact of the stimulus is to view two key employment metrics, that of the construction sector and that of the governmental employee sector. Since the stimulus the national unemployment rate for the construction sector has risen to 23%. Not what one would expect from a "package" that was supposedly filled with shovel ready projects.

Concurrently, the unemployment rate for the governmental employee sector is at a warm and cozy 3%. Yes, 3%, 7 points lower than the national average. What does this mean?

Simply, this can provide a rough outline of what the true impact of the stimulus was. Since most of the money was released through the states, and since many of the states were facing huge revenue shortfalls, most used the money to shore up their own budgets by allotting stimulus money to pay for projects which they normally would have paid for in the past, adding little net jobs. In the mean time private sector activity continued to languish, limiting new hiring further.

With the majority of economic activity coming mainly from inventory replenishing, and not from actual expansion, real hiring continued to languish and was affected minimally by the stimulus. That is how one can have the government sector with 3% unemployment and the construction sector with 23% unemployment. They say the devil is in the details.In this case the details tells us that in real economic terms, the stimulus was insignificant.

Local and state governments benefited the most from this. Their is some solace in that, but the size of the stimulus required that to label it a winner it would have had to have had true economic growth as a result...it of course did not.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.