You’ve all heard a bajillion times by now that the stimulus bill has done nothing for the economy. Crunching today’s GDP numbers, however, Josh Bivens — someone who actually, you know, studied the data, which I know is a lot less entertaining that someone scoring partisan points on cable TV — begs to differ: The consensus of macroeconomic forecasters is that ARRA contributed roughly 3% to annualized growth rates in the second quarter. This means that absent its effects, economic performance would have resembled that of the previous three quarters, when the economy contracted at an average annual rate of 4.9%