[bestcigsnick]

TPM: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...my.php?ref=fpa

Republicans are citing data from President Obama's Counsel of Economic Advisers to argue that the stimulus has cost the economy nearly 300,000 jobs in the past few months.

The claim originated Sunday at the conservative Weekly Standard and has quickly mushroomed into a talking point: It's been cited already by both Douglas Holtz-Eakin -- an influential Republican economist -- and House Speaker John Boehner.

There's just one problem: it's false.

Over the past six months, and even before then, the stimulus has been winding down, and the fact that it's now responsible for the existence of fewer jobs than it was six months ago is a function of that phase-out, and the (slowly) recovering economy, not of its inherent ineffectiveness.

Here's Moody's Chief economist, Mark Zandi, in an email to me, explaining the data: "It's not that ARRA [the stimulus] is now costing the economy jobs, it is that the economy is now creating jobs without ARRA's help," Zandi says. "This is exactly the objective of fiscal stimulus, namely to end recession and jump-start economic recovery. The Great Recession ended in June 2009, the same month that ARRA was providing its maximum benefit to the economy. Stimulus was never intended to be a source of long-term economic growth, it was intended to stop the free-fall in the private sector. It did that."

...

Republicans are also citing the Weekly Standard article to revisit one of their oldest claims about the stimulus: that every job the Recovery Act saved or created cost taxpayers about $278,000. That's the number you get if you clumsily divide the cost of the stimulus by the number of jobs it's responsible for. The White House is aggressively pushing back on this argument by pointing out that the stimulus paid for more than jobs -- it paid for new infrastructure, materials and so on.

Zandi adds another layer to this critique: "[I]t is inappropriate to say that ARRA cost taxpayers $278k per job. The cost should be calculated based on the number of full-time equivalents," he said. Specifically, the stimulus' efficiency shouldn't be calculated based only on how many full-time jobs it was responsible for, but by how many part-time or seasonal jobs it created as well. "I'm not arguing that ARRA was as efficient as it could have been, although given the political constraints and the crisis environment it is a significant achievement."