Republicans refer to President Obama’s effort to stimulate the recessed economy he inherited from President Bush as, “… wasteful spending.”  This is an intentional effort to mislead us, the American people.

First, all of the other leading nations had their own stimulus package.  This means that all of the leaders of the world’s most robust economies and their respective advisers believed that a stimulus package would help to revive their economies.

Here are the facts regarding the stimulus packages other world leaders enacted.

China:  “The 2008–2009 Chinese economic stimulus plan is a RMB¥ 4 trillion (US$ 586 billion) stimulus package announced by the central government of the People’s Republic of China on 9 November 2008 as an attempt to minimize the impact of the global financial crisis on the world’s second largest economy.”

United Kingdom:  “THE UK Government has launched an economic stimulus package worth $47b to reignite consumer spending and help Britain recover from a deep recession.”

France: “France’s Prime Minister Francois Fillon has unveiled a series of measures worth 26bn euros ($33.1bn; £23.5bn) designed to “revitalise” the French economy.”

President Obama also collaborated with partner nations who agreed that the appropriation of stimulus money was the smart thing to do.

The fact is that economic recovery takes time with a concentrated effort to that end.  It took us approximately 10 years to recover from the Great Depression of 1929, and some expert economists estimat that it will take five years to rebound from our 1998 recession.  When you consider that our current economic condition was decades in the making, it seems reasonable to expect recovery to take at least five years.

“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”  – Winston Churchill

Whatever you believe, remember this.  Economics is not an exact science.  This means there was no foolproof fix to restore the economy to, say the Clinton era; nonetheless, the stimulus package more than likely prevented a depression.