Stimulus results: Difficult to pin down | GOVERNING

Suppose you’re a state budget director and you started this year looking at a huge fiscal shortfall (as virtually all of them did). It seemed inevitable that you’d have to cut workers from the state payroll—perhaps thousands of them. But you never put a precise number on it. Then the federal stimulus money showed up and it turned out you barely had to lay off anyone at all. That was undeniably good news. However, it raises a difficult question. Just how many jobs in your state did the stimulus actually save? There’s no real way to be sure. Says Don Elliman, who is overseeing the stimulus funds in Colorado, “We don’t know what programs we would have cut if we hadn’t had the money.”

In Colorado, as in most states, one of the first effects of the stimulus has been to bolster beleaguered balance sheets. This spring, state after state considered painful spending cuts and tax increases, and those moves would have been much more drastic had Congress not directed billions of dollars to state treasuries. Without the stimulus, Colorado might have cut millions from schools or health care or some other category of state spending. But lawmakers never had to decide...