"We didn’t know how well the COVID vaccine was going to work," Zandi says. "Who knew how the pandemic was going to play out? If you have uncertainty you want to err on the side of doing too much."
Without the rescue plan, 4 million fewer jobs would have been created in 2021, Zandi estimates.
But conservative economists say the stimulus wasn’t needed because the economy was already bouncing back from the COVID-19 recession. Employers had added more than 1 million jobs during the first two months of the year, just before Congress passed the rescue package.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 vaccinations were ramping up quickly, and many consumers were resuming dining out and other activities, says Chris Edwards, senior economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. As a result, he argues, the 22 million jobs wiped out by the health crisis were poised to come back even without the massive government aid.
"It was overkill," Edwards says.
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