Birds on the Brain

For starters, the stimulus was by far the largest energy bill in history, pouring a mind-boggling $90 billion into clean energy when we had been spending just a few billion dollars a year. It included unprecedented investments in wind, solar, and other renewables; energy efficiency in every form; a smarter grid; electric vehicles; advanced biofuels; and the factories to build all that green stuff in the U.S. The clean energy industry was on the brink of death after the financial collapse of 2008, but thanks to the stimulus, U.S. generation of renewable power has doubled under Obama. The stimulus is building the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar farms, and the nation’s first refineries for cellulosic biofuels. It created an advanced battery industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch, financing 30 new factories. And it launched a research agency called ARPA-E, modeled on the Pentagon’s DARPA unit that pioneered the Internet and GPS technology, that’s already creating the clean-energy breakthroughs of tomorrow.

As they say in the infomercials, that’s not all. The stimulus also poured $27 billion-with-a-b into health information technology that will drag our antiquated pen-and-paper medical system into the digital age, so just about every American will have an electronic medical record by 2015, and doctors will no longer kill their patients with chicken-scratch handwriting. The Recovery Act included the most dramatic federal education reforms in decades, including the Race to the Top competition that has transformed the national debate over public schools. It launched the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower, including a high-speed rail initiative that could transform America’s pathetic inter-city passenger trains. It modernized the New Deal-era unemployment insurance system, and extended broadband to underserved areas in ways reminiscent of the New Deal’s rural electrification. It included a new homelessness prevention program that kept 1.2 million Americans off the streets, so the homeless population declined despite the weak economy, and a new municipal bond program that financed $180 billion worth of public works, a stimulus hidden inside the stimulus. And so on.