At a meeting with “local job creators” at Consolidated Machine and Welding in Hannibal, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-7th) spread a little of the usual Republican B.S. about the effects of the stimulus:

The selfishness of what the government is doing and realizing that it is wrong and unsustainable and probably in that order. Even if it was sustainable, it’s wrong to decide we’re going to spend whatever we want and we’re going to let someone else figure out how to pay …

Kind of incoherent, but I think I know what he’s trying to say – and what I want to know is why didn’t anybody tell Blunt that the stimulus is working? According to a recent article in the National Journal:

If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Thanks to the massive job losses of the Bush recession, we won’t be out of the woods for a long time, but a good case can be made that Pat Garofalo of Think Progress is justified in claiming that the continuing improvement “is a strong sign that the economic stimulus package passed last year is doing what it is supposed to.”

And guess what?  Garofalo adds that contrary to the standard Republican talking point when confronted with job growth statistics, most of the new jobs were not in the public, but in the private sector – an important indicator that the economy is turning around. In all, 523,000 new jobs have been added in the private sector in the first four months of 2010.

Even the slight uptick in unemployment to 9.9% is less disappointing than in the past since, according to White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, “such a rise in the labor force often occurs in recoveries as workers who had dropped out of the labor force are drawn back in by improved employment opportunities.” Further reinforcing the meme of a recovering job market, The Wall Street Journal notes:

More U.S. workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March, the second month in a row this occurred and a sign of employees’ growing confidence that more positions are becoming available in a slowly recovering job market.

If Roy Blunt wants to keep on blathering abut the stimulus and the debt burden for future generations, somebody really ought to give him a few facts about the relationship between debt and economic growth. It’s simple really – if we create jobs now and grow the economy, there will be less debt for future generations, not more.

If all that was necessary for recovery was, in Roy’s words, for “government to step aside and let Main Street employers create the jobs that are needed most,” we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are in now – after all, it was eight years of laissez faire, hands-off, and every man for himself that got us into the mess we’re in in the first place – and all the desperate lies of sad, ideologically irrelevant pols like poor old Roy can’t really change that fact. The truth always comes out in the end.