Trump Distorts Stimulus
While calling for new infrastructure investments, President Donald Trump distorted the facts about President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. Trump described it as an “infrastructure bill” but “[n]obody ever saw anything being built” and most of the money was used on “social programs.”
Although the Obama administration promoted the bill’s infrastructure projects, the overriding goal of the stimulus package — which Trump praised at the time — was to jump-start the economy through a combination of tax cuts to spur spending, federal contracts and grants to create private-sector jobs, and federal aid to local and state governments to ease the effects of the Great Recession.
It’s true that about a third of the $840 billion stimulus package went toward social programs such as unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicaid assistance to states. But it would take a tortured definition of “social programs” to get to “most.” Fully a third of
