WASHINGTON – From Clear Channel to Texas Instruments, employers are hemorrhaging jobs. Will the stimulus bring them back?

The House's passage Wednesday of an $819 billion stimulus raises hopes that the massive package will speed the recovery from a recession whose victims now include Texas.

The Congressional Budget Office suggests the bill could create as many as 3.6 million jobs in the next two years, but the low-end estimate is only 1.2 million.

"You have several steps of uncertainty, so you are multiplying the uncertainty at each step," said Alan J. Auerbach, economist and director of the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California, Berkeley. "Despite the fact they have been talking about shovel-ready projects, it takes time."

The House bill would appear to be a savior for some businesses hit hardest by the recession, including makers of transportation equipment. On Wednesday, the Labor Department announced that those companies shed 64,336 jobs in December. Caterpillar added to the bad news this week, saying it would lay off 20,000 workers.

After resisting the recession for much of 2008, Texas' unemployment rate rose to 6 percent in December. The state, which lost about 11,300 manufacturing and construction jobs last month, would certainly get help from the stimulus, which includes $30 billion for roads and bridges and $10 billion for transit and rail projects.

Still, industry officials do not expect the stimulus to bring back all of their lost jobs.

"I don't know if we'll ever be able to settle that question, because other jobs are going to keep going away," said Ken Simonson, chief economist of the Association of General Contractors of America.

"You come back to me a year or two years from now and you'll say, 'construction employment is down from where it was in December 2008, the stimulus didn't work.' And I'll have to say, 'But look at what else is going on in the economy.' "

Economists say the package was designed to fight the recession, not necessarily reverse it. Unemployment could reach into the double digits without the mix of tax cuts and government spending, economist Mark Zandi told the House Budget Committee this week.

Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com, projects that nationwide unemployment would be 2 percentage points lower – representing about 4 million jobs – with the stimulus than without.

Adam S. Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, called that figure an "aspiration," saying he would "hang my hat on 2 million-plus jobs."

Zandi's analysis said Texas unemployment would be 1.5 percent lower – representing about 301,000 jobs – after the stimulus takes effect.

"It's important to pass this bill as soon as possible to keep Texas from facing the kind of economic devastation that Nevada and parts of California, Florida and Michigan are facing," said Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, who helped write the bill.

The measure garnered no votes from Republicans, who opposed the vast outlays for government programs and pushed instead to include more tax cuts.

"On the base of 150 million jobs, we are going to spend $275,000 per job to create or keep 1 million jobs?" said Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland. "That is a bad investment."

While job creation is a stated goal of the bill – many people experience a recession through losing a job – economists say progress depends on how quickly the money gets into the economy.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office raised some questions about the bill this week when it said about $525 billion, or 65 percent, would enter the economy by October 2010. That fell short of the 75 percent benchmark set by President Barack Obama.

Even highway projects, which have come to symbolize the stimulus, do not "spend out particularly rapidly," meaning the new jobs may not appear immediately, CBO director Douglas W. Elmendorf told lawmakers this week.

While states have insisted they are ready to quickly spend new highway dollars, the CBO's analysis said it would take "several years" to obligate such a large amount of new transportation funds.

That's why economists typically favor transfer payments as forms of fiscal stimulus. Unemployment benefits and food stamps, which would also be boosted by $56 billion through the stimulus, flow more quickly into the economy because people immediately spend that money on necessities. Still, those programs aren't likely to create large numbers of new jobs.

"There is some tradeoff between the immediacy and the ultimate bang for the buck," Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee on Tuesday. "There isn't a simple ranking of the pieces of the package."

The bill also contains measures that will probably be helpful to households but may not contribute significantly to job creation.

The bill includes, for instance, a $145 billion household tax cut that was promised by Obama during his campaign.

A similar tax rebate was given to households last year. But economists generally believe that households saved that money or used it to pay down mortgage and credit-card debt. "This is the political price to be paid for getting through the rest of the stimulus," Posen said.