In an effort to head off former Sen. Rick Santorum’s push on manufacturing in the key Super Tuesday state of Ohio, Mitt Romney this morning announced an “Ohio Manufacturers for Romney” coalition. A search of Recovery.gov shows that the corporations of two members of the group received nearly $1.6 million in Recovery Act funds.

Lincoln Electric of Cleveland received a sub-award of $1,125,00 on April 7, 2010 from the Ohio Department of Communications Development for an energy-related project in Euclid, Ohio. RPM International of Medina received two sub-awards in 2010, totaling $458,758 for two U.S. Army projects.

Romney, meanwhile, recently used the occasion of the Recovery Act’s third anniversary to continue attacking the law:

The Congressional Budget Office reported last week that up to 2 million people were employed in December because of the stimulus.  Manufacturing jobs have also grown for the past two years in a row after previously seeing no annual growth at all since 1997.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus, became law three years ago this week, signed by President Obama less than a month into his presidency. At the time, financial and housing crises had plunged the American economy into a deep recession — in January 2009, the economy lost more than 800,000 jobs, more than in any single month in 60 years.

With its investments into infrastructure projects, tax cuts, and aid to states, the stimulus was designed to curb the effects of the recession and turn the economy back around. Though Republicans have criticized the effort and subsequent attempts to stimulate the economy as “failed policies,” early analysis has shown that the stimulus saved and created millions of jobs and pulled the American economy away from the precipice of collapse.

In a new analysis, Center for American Progress Director for Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden examined the American economy in three parts — before the recession, during the recession, and after the stimulus passed — to find out if the stimulus did, indeed, work. As the video below shows, there is no doubt that the stimulus turned the economy around and put it on the path to recovery:

The Great Recession has steadily eaten away at the economic security of many Americans. Facing stagnant wages, growing unemployment, and rising health care costs, nearly 50 percent of Americans are slipping from the shrinking middle-class into low-income status or even poverty. In 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in order to bolster job creation and fend off an even more severe downturn. The ARRA passed without a single House Republican vote, with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) calling it a “woefully inadequate” response.

However, a new report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness reveals that the Recovery Act was vital in keeping Americans off the street. An estimated $1.5 billion of Recovery Act funds were directed towards “rental assistance and programs steering recently evicted people toward new housing.” According to Alliance President Nan Roman, those funds were instrumental in keeping the number of homeless down “even as the U.S. economy saw its worst downturn since the 1930s”:

The Homelessness Research Institute, the educational arm of Roman’s organization, put the number of Americans living on the streets or in shelters at just over 636,000 in 2011. That’s down about 6,000 from the group’s 2009 estimate. The figure is based on reports and street counts from state and local agencies that receive federal housing funds.

Roman said the stimulus money, coupled with pre-recession federal programs aimed at veterans and the chronically ill, have kept that figure down even as the U.S. economy saw its worst downturn since the 1930s. But that money is drying up now that the Obama administration, Congress and the states are grappling with budget issues fueled by the recession.

In fact, the Homelessness Prevention Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP) program alone, which was directly funded by the Recovery Act, helped 94 percent of the program’s participants who were homeless or a step away from homelessness find permanent housing. The Recovery Act also kept 6 million Americans out of poverty and created at least 3.3 million jobs.

But ARRA funds are running out and, as the report notes, the number of Americans facing the prospect of homelessness is continuing to rise. More than 4 million homes were foreclosed upon since 2007 and the New York Federal Reserve estimates that 3.6 million more will be lost to foreclosure in the next two years. If Republicans continue to slash these housing programs, thousands of vulnerable Americans will face the exact situation the Recovery Act helped successfully prevent.

Not surprisingly, Republican lawmakers have uniformly come out against President Obama’s plan to pay down the deficit in part by raising taxes on the wealthy. But Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) had an usual attack on the proposal, telling NPR that, like the 2009 Economic Recovery Act, Obama’s new plan is just “more taxes and not enough cuts”:

SHELBY: Oh you mean his big tax increase and all that? Absolutely, I have a lot of reaction to it. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s like the son of stimulus. It’s always more taxes and not enough cuts.

Listen here:

As the Senate Banking Committee’s ranking member, Shelby almost certainly knows that the Recovery Act did not raise taxes. In fact, it cut them by $288 billion, mostly through tax credits for 95 percent of working families. There were zero tax increases in the stimulus package, nor were there any cuts, as the entire purpose of the bill was to jumpstart the economy.