The Hill’s lede is appropriately skeptical:

A new jobs bill is needed even though the $787 billion economic stimulus package saved or created roughly 2 million jobs, the Obama administration claimed Tuesday.

In a sense, the models and estimates that the administration continues to trot out to bolster its phony “created or saved” metric just aren’t important. The question, as I wrote last week, is whether keeping the economy on life support via endless borrowing and spending is a viable strategy — that is, in a balance-sheet recession, can the private economy recover as long as the government puts all the bad debt on its own balance sheet?

I would argue that it cannot. The size of the deficits we are running from here to enternity is a destabilizing force in our economy, creating a level of uncertainty about the strength of our country and the value of our currency that is absolutely deadly to entrepreneurship — the real source of job-creation. (And that’s before we get into health care, cap and trade, new and exotic forms of taxation, etc.) As Mark Steyn has written elsewhere, it doesn’t matter if the stimulus “saves or creates” a hundred kazillion jobs. As long as those jobs are “created” by taxing or borrowing money out of the productive economy and deploying it in ways the market has no use for (see here and here and here and here and here and here and here and . . . you get the point), we are actually slowing the righting of the ship and making it more likely that we’ll capsize again.