David Leonhardt takes Scott Brown to task for hyperbole:
Even if the conventional wisdom is understandable, however, it has consequences. Because the economy is still a long way from being healthy, members of Congress are now debating another, smaller stimulus bill. (They’re calling it a “jobs bill,” seeing stimulus as a dirty word.) The logical thing to do would be to examine what worked and what didn’t in last year’s bill.
But that’s not what is happening. Instead, the debate is largely disconnected from the huge stimulus experiment we just ran. Why? As Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the newest member of Congress, said, in a nice summary of the misperceptions, the stimulus might have saved some jobs, but it “didn’t create one new job.”
Ah, if only this blog served to counter hyperbolic statements by progressive legislators … One imagines that ARRA has created more than one new job, which means that Brown’s statement is obviously false. There is, however, another way of looking at the statement. Has it created one “new” job, i.e., have we climbed out of the sharp decline in employment and started generating more jobs than we had relative to the end of 2008? This was the metric that many critics used to great effect in 2004 when criticizing the Bush administration, for the good reason that it was a politically effective talking point that spoke to real and legitimate anxieties that stemmed from the “jobless recovery.” I made this criticism myself, and I called for a program of wage subsidies designed to stimulate employment growth.