A reader e-mails with a few ripostes to my last post that I thought were worth responding to, in case I hadn’t been clear on some things:

Your post is funny, in this sense: if you made your “reasoned” arguments in the first half to the well-known economics theorist you quote in the second part (Sarah Palin), she would gaze at you with the blankest of stares, not comprehending a word of it.

Sarah Palin is not a well-known economics theorist. She is a politician who speaks to the base of the conservative political movement in plain language. She is an effective populist leader, and very useful in that role. The appropriate comparison is not to John Taylor but to Pat Buchanan — and, would I rather have Sarah Palin, with her libertarian-leaning brand of populism, in that role than Buchanan, with his Buchanan-leaning brand? Yes. Yes I would.

(Also, if my reader is one who bought into the more extreme scenarios stemming from climate change (and perhaps he’s not) he should be careful about appeals to authority in any case, given how badly the scientists he trusted for years let him down.)

You denounce others for not considering all the downsides of creating jobs or growing GDP, but your tune sure has shifted from the “not one job” days. To be fair, I haven’t tracked your commentary so I don’t know if you were among the “not one job” crowd, but the point is that those who predicted, or even now claim, that the stimulus produced no jobs are reduced to whining about tradeoffs, hoping to change the subject, so they never have to admit they were wrong.

I think the “not one job” cry was a way to simplify a more complicated argument, which I (and others) have been making, which is that we have no way of knowing how many net jobs the stimulus “created or saved,” because we don’t know what would have happened to the money if the government hadn’t borrowed so much. We don’t know what businesses would have added jobs but for the uncertainty stemming from a “temporary” spending blowout which will probably result in higher tax rates in future — who can make long-term plans around such arrangements? And if “whining about trade-offs” means pointing out that the stimulus has probably delayed job losses rather than obviated them, then that doesn’t really contradict the “not one job” claim — but I suppose that in the long run, we’re still all dead.

It is also disingenuous to single out rhetorical retreats on one side without acknowledging corresponding retreats on the other. The administration’s own estimates of jobs “created or saved” — a metric that, as Byron York points out, was “once-common, then-abandoned, now-revived” — have ranged anywhere from 1.5 to 3 million, and stand currently at 2 million. At first they said the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. With unemployment at 9.7 percent, they now admit that their projections were a little off. Compared to such large swings, the difference between “not one job” and “relatively few jobs given the money we spent” is not so large.

Why should this nation listen to economic advice from those who drove this economy into the ditch with the worst eight-year job record in U.S. history?

Hello, word-for-word DNC talking point. But if you want a serious answer to that question, don’t take my word for it: The guys who predicted the financial crisis are now buying gold.