Breaking News: Bond spouting nonsense about economic stimulus bill

On the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Bond said that the President's economic stimulus plan "will do very little to stimulate the economy or job creation" (emphasis his).

This, of course, is absurd. In fact, the stimulus package could create or save about 73,000 jobs in Missouri and provide tax refunds up to $1,000 to more than 2 million workers. Daniel Gross addresses Bond's claims directly in Newsweek:

The GOP says the stimulus can't create jobs. They're wrong...

Today, government accounts for 22.5 million of the nation's 135.5 million payroll jobs, or 16.6 percent. Those numbers include people who work for the federal, state, and local governments—doctors and nurses in public hospitals and teachers at elementary schools and public universities. Government also has created—and continues to create—all sorts of private-sector jobs, for defense contractors, the aerospace industry, medical-device makers, real estate companies, and construction firms. The economy of the Washington, D.C., area has boomed in recent decades not so much because the federal government has expanded its payrolls massively but because private government contractors have been thriving...

Contra [Sen. Jim] DeMint, borrowing and spending are pretty much how the government has pulled itself out of every modern recession. And contrary to what Bond argues, mass transit can be plenty stimulative. (Here's a report from the New York Times on the economic impact of the Second Avenue subway project in Manhattan.) For an example of how a little spending on mass transit might save jobs, Bond could look a little closer to home. The New York Times reported Wednesday on how St. Louis' inability to fund its bus system means hundreds of employees will find it impossible to get to work. In the case of St. Louis, several million dollars might help save a few jobs. That sounds defensive. But in a period when Americans are losing jobs at a furious clip, when the economy is shrinking rapidly, when monetary policy is near exhaustion, and when tax cuts aren't likely to work as they do in ordinary times, the highest priority is simply to stop the downward spiral.

Gross' full column is here.

UPDATE: KY3 has posted video of Bond's speech.