In her recent speech about the impact of the stimulus effort, Christina Romer, Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, noted that “as of the end of June, more than $100 billion had been spent.”
If you visit the government web site tracking the stimulus (Recovery.gov), however, it will tell you that the government had paid out only about $60 billion by July 3. (You can find this figure in the chart at the lower right hand corner of the home page.)
Why does Christi report a figure so much larger than the one reported on the official website? Because Recovery.gov isn’t tracking all of the budget effects of the stimulus.
Christi’s figure includes the $60 billion of spending reported on Recovery.gov plus an internal estimate, prepared by Treasury, of the tax reductions resulting from the stimulus effort through June 24. Those tax reductions are obviously a big deal, totaling $40 billion or slightly more through the end of June.
Based on conversations with friends and journalists, I get the sense that some users of Recovery.gov do not realize that its figures cover only the spending side of the stimulus story, not the tax side.
As a result, I think Recovery.gov is (unintentionally) confusing people into thinking that the stimulus effort to date is smaller than it has actually been.
I have two suggestions for how to fix this:
Step 1: Reduce Confusion: Recovery.gov should slap a warning label on the home page chart (and everywhere else it reports aggregate figures) that says something like: “These figures reflect only the new Federal spending that has resulted from the recovery act. The act also included significant tax reductions that aren’t reflected here.”
Step 2: Provide the Information: Of course, it would be even better if Treasury would release official estimates of the week-by-week or month-by-month tax reductions flowing from the recovery act. These figures would obviously be estimates — and thus not able to be audited to the same degree as the spending programs — but would be invaluable to analysts trying to track the impact of the stimulus effort.
P.S. As I noted last week, the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the total budget impact of the stimulus effort reached about $125 billion through the end of July.
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