Did the stimulus save the construction industry?

President Obama's stimulus package has been credited with providing 133,000 construction jobs and keeping workers on site during the recession.

According to a White House study, the money from the economic stimulus funds have saved over a million jobs, with 133,000 in the construction industry. These figures provided by the White House Council of Economic Advisers are estimates but are figured in a report on the impact on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The CEA's first quarterly look at ARRA has been criticised by the Republican party saying the figures are a deception.

Rep. Tom Price (Ga.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said, "The fuzzy math used to produce these claims of jobs 'saved or created' bears no resemblance to anything our children learn in school."

However, the CEA have said the figures released are a calculation compared with the what the level would have been had the stimulus bill not been passed. Their calculations show that 85,000 of the construction jobs can be traced to the industry's high degree of cyclicality. It also adds that the other 48,000 construction jobs represent that sector's share of the "rising tide" that ARRA has produced for the economy as a whole.

Despite this, the report states that the country's Gross Domestic Product has grown by 2.3 percent in the second quarter of this year and is expected to produce 2.7 percent in the third.

The report does not though that of the ARRA's total $787 billion, only $16.5 billion of those outlays have come in the "government investment" category, the sector that includes most of the stimulus measure's construction funding.

Despite the report, the CEA acknowledges that things are still grave in the industry. "The economy is obviously still far from healthy." It notes that millions remain unemployed and that the 276,000 jobs lost in July and 216,000 lost in August are "obviously unacceptable," a spokesman said.

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