

The economy is sluggish and unemployment is on the rise, but Republicans and their allies say they want nothing to do with President Obama’s agenda for job creation because it’ll be just another “failed stimulus." Here's John Boehner making that argument on his official blog. Here's Karl Rove doing the same on Fox News. And here's Richard Posner offering his version at TNR -- although, to be fair, he merely calls the stimulus "botched" and I'm not sure he qualifies as a Republican ally.

Of course, the argument isn't new. The phrase "failed stimulus" has been a staple of Republican rhetoric since the fall of 2009. But it was wrong then and it’s wrong now, at least according to the the people most qualified to judge it. As David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times:

Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs.

That was in February of 2010. Fifteen months later, in May of this year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that, as of the most recent quarter, the Recovery Act had

increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 3.3 million and increased the number of full-time equivalent jobs by 1.6 million to 4.6 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise.

And just a month ago, the president's Council of Economic Advisers came up with similar estimates (2.4 to 3.6 million jobs) using its own forecasting models. You'll find a few critics on the right who dispute the reliability of these models, but they are a distinct minority and it's not as if they have a compelling alternative theory. Keep in mind, by the way, that the administration had predicted the Recovery Act would create 3.5 million jobs, which is on the high end but in the same ballpark as most other estimates.

Yes, the administration also predicted unemployment would peak at around 8 percent. That was obviously very wrong. The jobless rate hit 9 percent in the middle of 2009 and, except for a brief period this year, hasn’t dipped below since. Those are the figures critics always use to make their point. But few mainstream experts doubt that, if not for the Recovery Act, today’s unemployment rate would be significantly higher.