More details on stimulus spending
TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: President Obama and Vice President Biden are meeting with members of the Cabinet later this morning. The president wants to lay out specific goals for how to spend stimulus money during the next several months. Ashley Milne-Tyte has that.
Ashley Milne-Tyte: The president wants agencies to come up with more detailed plans for stimulus spending. He wants to make sure those billions of dollars go into the right contracts and programs to shake up the economy.
The whole point of the stimulus was to get people back to work. The new unemployment rate of 9.4 percent has shown the administration that goal is more elusive than they thought. When they first introduced the plan, they predicted unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8 percent.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, only about $25 billion of the $787 billion package has been spent so far. But a lot more money is expected to go out this summer as states meet a July application deadline for federal aid.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte for Marketplace.
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