The Huffington Post reports: Job Stimulus Results: White House Claims ‘Stunning’ Two Million Jobs Saved Or Created. It states:
the report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers said the economy is a lot better off than it would have been without the stimulus. Citing its own analysis plus a range of private sector summaries, the council estimated the annual growth rate last year would have been roughly 2 percentage points lower, and there would have been 1.5 million to 2 million fewer jobs.
So this is based on a projection of what might have happened without the stimulus in place, something that is probably tricky to model, and impossible to prove (without a time machine). But if the “range of private sector summaries” were done independently, a positive consensus would indeed be a promising sign.
Here are some other analyses that paint a different picture:
