Thursday, December 30, 2010

The stimulus was good for Philadelphia

The federal reporting rules make an exact stimulus-created jobs figure for city residents very difficult to calculate, but a conservative estimate would be in the thousands. A recent report from the Keystone Research Center estimates that Philadelphia's unemployment rate would have shot to 20 percent without the stimulus. Instead, the rate at the end of October was 11.5 percent.

The money hasn't always been spent efficiently -- or, as the story notes, spent at all. But I'd take an 8.5 percent drop in unemployment any day.

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