Previously: Suppose you held a film festival and right wingnuts didn’t want anyone to attend

We cover politics and government in Missouri. We don’t usually cover film festivals. Unless government and politics somehow gets into the mix.

It has.

So, I found myself attending a Show Me Social Justice International Film Festival event at a Warrensburg movie theater.

Dee Wallace (left) and Pam LaFrenz, Executive Director of the Missouri Valley Community Action Agency.

The event took place right before a festival screening of Winter’s Bone, a film about Missouri (That’s like saying that Titanic was a film about a holiday cruise…).

The theatrical trailer for Winter’s Bone:

So I got to meet Dee Wallace, talk with people about the festival and Denny Hoskins’ (r-noun, verb, CPA) war on local economic development, and I also learned that Denny Hoskins (r) had issued a press release today taking credit for sinking the grant funding for the film festival.

Yeah, I know, an obvious public relations coup for someone who’s really concerned about local economic development.

Putting Johnson Countians back to work is my first priority.

Yeah, right.  

Western Missouri Medical Center in Warrensburg, Missouri is expanding and remodeling its facilities.

In yesterday’s Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal:

…American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds play a key role in the $54 million construction project at Western Missouri Medical Center, a USDA representative said Wednesday.

“If not for the stimulus funds, we probably wouldn’t be in this room today,” USDA State Rural Development Director Anita “Janie” Dunning said.

Without stimulus money, Gregory said, the USDA could not have loaned the hospital $34 million…

It’s the only hospital in the county – the nearest hospital after that is at least thirty miles away.

The punch line? A republican state senator was quoted in the same article:

…Sen. David Pearce said, “We’ve all invested in this hospital and believe in it.”

Wait, doesn’t the Missouri republican playbook dictate that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is pure evil? Just asking.

I haven’t had time to take a careful look at the “jobs” plan Roy Blunt unveiled yesterday. At a cursory glance, it seems like the same recipe that cost us 9 million jobs in the worst recession since the 1930s: gut regulation, cut taxes for the wealthy, roll back health care reform and let costs escalate, etc. Par for the course.

This lack of substance is, of course no surprise to those of us who have followed Blunt’s career as a corporate toady doing latrine duty in the Senate – take, for instance, the total lack of product, other than conservative platitudes, that emanated from the Republican Healthcare Solutions Group that Blunt chaired.

Think Progress‘ Pat Garafalo offers some initial insights into the lack of there there that tend to confirm my initial impression. Garofalo faults Blunt’s plan for the predictable emphasis on “fearmongering about the deficit,” and argues that Blunt’s desire to rescind the unspent stimulus funds would amount to a tax on the middle class. More interestingly, Garofalo notes that in spite of all the deficit rhetoric, one of the few substantive proposals involves extending an expensive stimulus benefit for the real estate industry. Should we believe that it is just a coincidence that real estate is one of Blunt’s ten largest donor groups when his receipts are broken down by industry, having gifted him with more than $150,000 during the 2009-2010 election cycle?

But, you ask, ever ready to extend the benefit of the doubt, the important question is whether or not this benefit will actually create jobs? According Garofalo:

… the home buyer’s tax credit was enacted as part of the stimulus and then extended a couple of times, and by all accounts it was a complete and total boondoggle, costing taxpayers billions to subsidize activity that was going to happen anyway. Even the credit’s staunchest supporters have said that its “sunsetting is an incentive to drive people to the marketplace” and poo-pooed the notion of extending it forever, which clearly turns it into a permanent subsidy to the real estate industry.

Garofalo especially disdains Blunt’s willingness to extend this benefit given his jump-on-the-bandwagon bleating about the dangers of the deficit. I would add that a person who spends so much time trying to paint a moderately successful round of stimulus spending as a failure, should be really, really careful about selectively extending it for favored campaign contributors. Though Blunt’s two-faced response to the stimulus is, I guess, kind of an old story by now – he has been more than willing to claim credit for the goodies it brought the state – but it still stinks when he tries to use those funds to do his benefactors a solid on the public dime. It’ll be interesting to see just what other giveaways are tucked into Mr. Blunt’s loudly ballyhooed jobs plan.

Thanks to the Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and Senate, who persevered in the face of ongoing Republican obstruction, Missouri will receive almost $400 million dollars to stave off teacher layoffs and cuts in Medicaid. This means, as Michael Bersin pointed out earlier, that jobs have been saved. Many of our neediest have been given breathing space for another year. The state, which is balancing on the edge of a fiscal knife, may avoid, for one more year at least, transformation into the third-world outpost that GOP legislative leaders seem to want to create.

It’s no surprise, though, that those same just-say-no Republicans who tried to kill the bill  are hell-bent on distorting this tiny extension of stimulus spending.

Blaine Luetkemeyer, for instance, wants to turn the tables and present his obstruction as an effort to save jobs:

It was a bad bill, pure and simple. It’s another bailout,” Luetkemeyer said. “Our challenge is to find ways to help businesses keep doing what they’re doing.

Luetkemeyer is partially right. Finding ways to help small businesses grow and expand is important if we are going to crawl out of this recession – but the way to do it is not to destroy the consumer base that provides the fuel for economic growth.  

Todd Akin tried another tack: play on the sense of resentment that seems to animate so many Republicans. Akin asks us to begrudge the money going to those grasshoppers in spendthrift states who fiddled while industrious Missouri ants suffered and cut their social spending right through to the bones of the neediest among them:

It wasn’t easy but our legislature balanced Missouri’s budget. And most Missourians individually make difficult and responsible spending choices every day. Yet today’s bill will force Missourians – and all Americans – to spend the next decade paying off six months of new spending, most of which will benefit states that had neither the courage nor the wisdom to balance their own budgets.

The next decade paying it off? Akin is more economically challenged than I thought – the bill is not only “paid-for” out of cuts elsewhere, but it will cut $1 billion from the deficit.

Roy Blunt couldn’t be bothered to vote on this spendig bill because he was too busy campaigning in Missouri – which is to say gallivanting around the state lying about his record as a leader of the Republican Congress responsible for a recession that cost the country nearly eight million jobs. When the Carnahan campaign called him on his dereliction, however, he quickly jumped on the resentment and begrudgery band-wagon so capably driven by Akin:

Now she’s [i.e., Carnahan] supporting another $26.1 billion bailout for states that have failed to manage their budgets so they can kick the can down the road another year. Missourians are saying ‘enough is enough.

I don’t know about all the Missourians that Blunt evidently thinks he speaks for, but this Missourian has had enough. Enough of lies about the stimulus, enough of obstruction, and more than enough of what is happening to our state because these prime jackasses think that they can keep on keeping on if only they make sure that the economy tanks so they can blame it on the Democrats. Ezra Klein eloquently sums the situation up:

…there’s no debate over what state and local aid does: It allows the continuation of programs that are already ongoing, the preservation of jobs that people already occupy, the protection of tax rates that are currently in place. It doesn’t promote economic expansion, which is a somewhat uncertain business. It prevents economic contraction, which is a much more predictable project.

If states have to cut $120 billion from their budgets, that money — and the things it does — will just leave the economy. There will be fewer jobs, higher taxes, less financial aid. None of that is speculative. There’s no theory in which it doesn’t happen.

Apropos of the Republican obstructionism which is on the verge of driving the economy into a double-dip recession, Matt Iglesias writes:

… the way the American political system works, the minority party that prevented the majority from addressing the crisis will accrue massive political benefits as a result of the collapse.

Conservatives won’t admit it today, but what we’re looking at is a major breakdown of the logic of the American political system.

What he is talking about is the fact that Republicans, who during the Bush years drove the economy pell-mell off a cliff, have, as an electoral strategy, steadfastly worked to ensure that Rush Limbaugh gets his wish that the President fail – and if that sinks the economy for the next decade, well, the devil take the hindmost. They have fought everything that we know, based on historical precedent, to be sound economic policy, and they succeeded in hobbling the initial stimulus by paring it to half of what it should have been.

The main GOP tool for wreaking self-righteous havoc: like the liar screaming fire in a crowded theater, they rampage through the media screaming something to the effect that the deficit is coming and it’s going to eat your children – after running up record deficits under every Republican president since Reagan. They’ve managed to bamboozle economically ignorant Americans who actually believe cable news sound-bites offering simple formulas that distort the complex relationship between short-term stimulative spending and long-term debt.

Nor are GOPers one-trick ponies; they have one more especially potent tool: go on the offensive and lie like a dog. Deny the demonstrable fact that even a weak stimulus moved us toward recovery – which might mean that a bigger stimulus could spur a bigger recovery.  Deny that the growth of the national debt, as Ezra Kleiln points out, reflects “a massive drop in revenues, not $4 trillion in spending over the past two years… .”

You want an example? I give you Roy Blunt trotting out, rather lackadaisically, I admit, the GOP two-pronged tool box, the lazy pol’s substitute for a campaign strategy, but one that he clearly expects reward him with a Senate seat:

Paul Krugman tells us that our political culture is sick:

… a culture that rewards hypocrisy and irresponsibility rather than serious efforts to solve America’s problems. And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable, if they choose – and they have so chosen.

My question: why would anyone want to send one more irresponsible hypocrite like Roy Blunt to the senate where he gets to help wield the filibuster for the benefit of the cronies and campaign contributors whose welfare kept him so busy in the House?  Why should we reward him for failure in the past just because he promises to do the same thing in the future?

Roy Blunt tweeted earlier today:

Biden says failing $862B “stimulus” was too small and would have been bigger with more Democrats. The choice is clear on Nov. 2.

Failing stimulus? Guess Roy prefers to ignore the figures from the new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the impact of the stimulus on employment and economic growth:

* Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,

* Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,

* Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and

* Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. …

Or maybe Blunt is agreeing with VP Biden that the stimulus should have been larger?  That would certainly also put him in agreement with economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini who are pointing out that the current slowdown in the recovery can be traced to an inadequate stimulus package. Somehow, though, I doubt that our Roy is much swayed by expert opinion, so I think we are left with a nasty little exercise in how to be both dishonest and snide in 140 characters or less.

Blunt is, of course, like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, unequivocally correct that the choice is clear come November. Sadly, though, he seems to be relying on the not unreasonable hope that the Republican effort to obstruct economic progress while muddying public perception will win out. As Paul Krugman observed today:

Since Mr. Obama took office, they [i.e. Republicans] have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

We’ll be covering President Obama’s visit to Kansas City tomorrow, both at the Smith Electric Vehicle plant and at one of the fundraising events for Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan’s U.S. Senate campaign. As a prelude to tomorrow’s activities the White House offered a media conference call with administration officials this afternoon on the Recovery Act event:

The White House

Office of Media Affairs

For Immediate Release

July 7, 2010

CONFERENCE CALL: Administration Officials to Preview the President’s Upcoming Visit to Kansas City, Missouri

WASHINGTON- Today, at 1:00 p.m. EDT Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist to Vice President Biden, and Matt Rogers, Senior Advisor to Energy Secretary Chu will hold a conference call to preview the President’s upcoming visit to Kansas City, Missouri.  

In Kansas City on July 8, President Obama will visit Smith Electric Vehicles where he will tour the facilities and deliver remarks on the economy to workers.  Smith Electric Vehicles is an all-electric, zero emissions commercial truck manufacturer that received a $32 million Recovery Act grant to build all-electric trucks.  The award, which is part of the $2.4 billion in Recovery Act advanced battery and electric vehicle grants the President announced last August, is helping Smith Electric establish operations at a re-purposed jet engine overhaul facility at the Kansas City International Airport, the first of as many as 20 regional assembly plants Smith Electric plans to open in the U.S….

The transcript:

Matt Lehrich, White House Communications: Hey everybody, it’s Matt Lehrich, in White House Communications, thanks for joining us today.  We are joined by Jared Bernstein who is chief economist for Vice President Biden and by Matt Rogers, Senior Advisor to Energy Secretary Chu. Gonna talk a little bit about, uh, what the President’s gonna be talking about tomorrow as well as the Recovery Act more broadly, and some of the specific programs under Department of Energy. And with that I’ll turn it over to Jared Bernstein….

….Jared Bernstein , Chief Economist to Vice President Biden: Uh, thank you very much Matt, and I, uh, very, uh, happy to be here along with, uh, another  Matt, Matt Rogers, uh, the Senior Advisor to Secretary Chu, and someone who’s, uh, been working tirelessly on, uh, uh, uh, efficiently implementing the kinds of programs we’re talking about today.

Uh, uh, before we even took office, uh, President-elect Obama recognized the urgent need to do two things. First, get economic medicine into system quickly and address what was then morphing into the deepest recession in decades. And second, incentivize investment that would both create good jobs today and plant the seeds of key new industries for tomorrow, particularly in the area of clean energy. The President’s trip to Kansas City, Missouri tomorrow to Smith Electric Vehicles is a great example of this second priority and Matt will present, uh, the details in a moment.

But first, I’d like to put the President’s visit in the broader context of the current economy and the Recovery Act. Now remember the act was passed back in February of two thousand and nine, a time when the nation’s job market was hemorrhaging jobs at, at a truly nightmarish rate. In just the first six months of last year, uh, the job market shed close to four million jobs. The Recovery Act quickly got the medicine into the system in the form of tax relief for over a hundred million working families, relief for strapped states as well, as millions who had lost their jobs and needed fast help making their family budgets. Almost immediately, as these stimulus dollars began to circulate throughout the economy the pace of job losses slowed and now we’ve seen net job growth in six of the last seven months. Now think about the pace of this turnaround. As I noted a second ago, in the first six months of last year we shed three point seven million private sector jobs. In the first six months of this year we’ve added five hundred and ninety-three thousand private sector jobs. All told the Recovery Act has widely credited with creating or saving two and a half million jobs so far, on track to create or save three and a half million by the end of this year. That’s solid movement in the right direction, but it’s not good enough. While this economic recovery that’s underway is slowly being felt in many parts of the country it’s clearly not yet provided the American middle class with, uh, the, the full [inaudible] of opportunities they need and they deserve. We’ve got to do more, uh, a lot more, to build on the momentum, uh, achieved thus far. And that’s what the President’s trip tomorrow is all about.

The Smith Electric story provides a great microcosm of the Recovery Act’s innovation agenda. First, while the quickly acting programs got up and running right away, folks on Matt’s team over at DOE, the Department of Energy, were busy choosing the best applicants, the ones who were gonna deliver the best bang for the buck from applicants to programs like the electric vehicle grants one. And this two point four billion dollar program is a subset of over one hundred billion dollars of innovation investments in clean energy, health IT, grid modernization, high speed rail, and broadband Internet access. It’s precisely by planting these seeds that the federal government incentivizes private capital to come in off of the sidelines and get to work building new sectors of our economy, and in the process, creating good jobs here in America. In fact, the two point four billion dollars from the electric vehicle program leverages up dollar for dollar partnering with private investment to increase the American footprint in this industry. Now last year the U.S. had only two factories manufacturing advanced vehicle batteries. And the produced less than two percent of the world’s advanced vehicle batteries. While the investment from the re, with the investment from the Recovery Act, by twenty-twelve thirty factories are expected to come online with capacity to produce more than twenty percent of the world’s advanced batteries, enough batteries and components to support five hundred thousand plug-in and hybrid electric vehicles.

The economics of all this are very compelling right now. The American middle class needs robust job growth, but that’s not all. In order to tap the productive potential of the greatest workforce in the world and create lasting opportunities for working Americans, the ones they need and deserve, our firms and our industries must overcome a set of steep market barriers to entry and expansion that they currently face, including tight credit, high fixed costs, scale economies, and highly aggressive competition from abroad. Programs like the advance battery grants can help businesses overcome these barriers and that leads to good jobs here at home. That in turn leads to higher living standards for working families as they finally have a clean shot at claiming their fair share of the growing economy, something that has eluded them for decades as economic growth was too often a spectator sport for the middle class. It’s a whole other dimension of the Recovery Act at work and we’re excited to see it unfold as the new economic expansion gets underway. Uh, Matt.

Matt Rogers, Senior Advisor to Energy Secretary Chu: Thank you Jared and, and thanks to that, uh, good, uh, overview of where we are overall in the Recovery Act. Smith specifically received a thirty-two million dollar grant under the Recovery Act. They matched this with thirty-six million dollars in their own, uh, private capital as part of a project to build five hundred all electric trucks in Kansas City. This was all part of the two point four billion dollars in battery and transportation electrification awards we announced last August. And these are, again, all electric trucks that will be used by Coca-Cola, AT and T, Staples, Frito Lay, Pacific Gas and
Electric, and Kansas City and Power and Light in their fleets. These all electric trucks have a hundred mile range. They can carry sixteen thousand pounds, making these vehicles very well suited for stop and go short haul circuits for delivery, equipment installation, uh, and maintenance, uh, service truck fleets. Like those, uh, we mentioned earlier.

These all electric trucks should deliver significantly lower fuel costs, lower operating costs, less particulate [inaudible] and CO2 pollution than the largely diesel  powered vehicles that they will replace, uh, in these fleets. Smith’s assembling these vehicles in an eighty thousand square foot facility at Kansas City International Airport that used to actually be a jet engine overhaul, uh, facility. Smith has three assembly lines, uh, in operation, uh, today. Uh, total employment for this facility under this contract, uh, will grow to seventy, but we expect there is a large market for these, uh, electric trucks. And we expect demand to grow as the market proves out the economics for these vehicles.

Importantly this investment is part of the administration’s major push to restructure the transportation sector, reducing our dependence on oil, improving our environment, developing god jobs, uh, today, and laying the foundation for long term economic growth by positioning the United States as a leader in high growth markets like the electric vehicle, uh, markets for the twenty-first century. This is also an important part of a Kansas City story, where Kansas City is building out a, uh, very attractive smart grid network, also under the Recovery Act, uh, and it developed a, a , uh, green zone within Kansas City that is bringing in, uh, renewables, more transportation electrification, uh, and doing a whole set of things around energy efficiency within the, within the community there. So it’s a great story about growing on a national basis and it’s also a very good story about, uh, Kansas City….

We plan on plenty of coverage of the two events tomorrow.

We received the following press release from the White House:

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of Media Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 4, 2010

Cabinet Secretaries, Senior Officials Hold Events Across the Country to Highlight Administration’s Commitment to Job Creation, Economic Growth

….Friday, June 4th….

….Department of Transportation

Secretary Ray LaHood, along with Reps. Russ Carnahan and Jo Ann Emerson, will attend the ribbon cutting at Holcim’s newest Recovery Act-funded cement plant in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri.  The plant supported 2,500 jobs during construction, and now supports 250 full-time permanent positions.

11:00am CDT

Holcim Ste. Genevieve Plant

…Bloomsdale, MO….

Wait a minute. Representative Jo Ann Emerson (r) was scheduled to attend the celebration of the fruits of the Recovery Act? Didn’t Jo Ann Emerson vote against the Recovery Act? Yep:

FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 46

(Democrats in roman; Republicans in italic; Independents underlined)

     H R 1      YEA-AND-NAY      28-Jan-2009      6:11 PM

QUESTION:  On Passage

BILL TITLE: Making supplemental appropriations for fiscal year ending 2009

—- NAYS    188 —

Emerson

We don’t know if she actually attended. If she did, that’s chutzpah for you.

What Jo Ann Emerson (r) has posted about the Recovery Act on her campaign blog:

Perryville Suntimes News: Emerson Says Stimulus Effect Lagging on MO Highways

March 11th, 2010

WASHINGTON Perry County’s representative in Congress, Jo Ann Emerson (MO-08) voted against the stimulus bill passed by Congress in early 2009, and she says that bill which contained more than $800 billion in new federal spending continues to disappoint Missourians. According to the Eighth District’s member of Congress, only $86 million of the state’s $974 million in requests from two key transportation grant programs have been fulfilled.

“Hurry up and wait is not a good strategy for stimulating our economy. I opposed the stimulus for two reasons: the spending was irresponsibly high, and I saw no way this money could be spent accountably by the federal government. The administration has proven both of these criticisms to be correct,” Emerson said. “We have a real need to spur growth in our rural economy, and we need strong transportation infrastructure not only to create jobs, but also to keep them,” Emerson stated.

Cement plants. Don’t they have something to do with road construction? Just asking.

Update:

Representative Emerson (r) was there:

Jo Ann Emerson Great grand opening event at Holcim today. More than a billion dollar investment, 2000 construction jobs and 250 permanent jobs. Holcim chose SE Missouri over the entire country for this plant. Thanks to the wonderful workforce we have that made this possible!

Chutzpah!

Correction, June 11, 2010: The White House added the following to their press release on their web site:

CORRECTION: An error in this advisory sent on Friday stated incorrectly that Holcim directly received ARRA funds.

The plant didn’t directly receive stimulus funds. Still, all those stimulus infrastructure projects need to be built out of some kind of material, right?

We received the following press release from the U.S. House Labor and Education Committee:

White House Releases State-by-State Estimates of Jobs Funded Through the Education Jobs Bill

Chairman Miller Urges Congress to Act Quickly to Prevent Students from Losing a Year of Learning

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today the White House released state-by-state estimates of the number of jobs that will be saved or created through the $23 billion Education Jobs Fund, that is included as emergency spending in the FY2010 Supplemental Appropriations Bill. The $23 billion emergency investment will help fund an estimated 300,000 education jobs across the country, including teachers, librarians, principals, guidance counselors, school cafeteria workers, and janitors, among others.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chair of the House Education and Labor Committee and a lead advocate in Congress for education jobs, released the following statement.

“The financial industry collapse has trickled down to local communities in the form of decreased revenues, lost property taxes

and, ultimately, harmful budget cuts to school districts across the country. Without immediate action, our students and teachers stand to suffer the consequences of a system breakdown in which they played no part. If we balk now and let our students lose a year of learning in our schools because of the of financial scandals, it will be a scandal on the Congress.”

“These budget cuts would punish teachers, devastate communities and set back the significant progress students have made since the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Keeping teachers in classrooms and educators in schools is part of a larger strategy of getting Americans back to work. By investing this emergency money to save jobs, we prevent further turmoil by keeping unemployment and COBRA costs from spiraling out of control and creating more burden on local communities….”

The estimate [pdf] for Missouri:

Estimates of Jobs Funded Under

Teacher Jobs Bill*

All Funding Directed to K – 12

Council of Economic Advisers

May 2010

Missouri 7,194

Total 313,471

Sources: State – level funding estimates from Department of Education; compensation estimates based on National Center for Education Statistics data.

*These estimates should be viewed as provisional and subject to margins of error.

And this definitely has local impact. From the Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal:

3/2/2010 12:47:00 PM

School officials cut budget now to lessen later pain

Jack Miles

Editor

Warrensburg – Teacher cutbacks and program reductions face students returning in the 2010-11 school year and cuts could worsen, district

administrators reported Monday.

The board-approved plan to slash spending by more than $1.5 million affects every district school….

If we don’t invest in the future we’re doomed.

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.