Where Are The Stimulus Jobs?

There's a lot of gum-flapping going on in Republican circles about how slowly the jobless numbers are rebounding. Not that they have a plan, of course, but that never stops them from pontificating about that which they themselves cannot solve.

Derek Thompson, via Andrew Sullivan, points to this chart and make an interesting observation:

The best explanation I've found for why the stimulus didn't work is this graph from the GAO analysis of the stimulus act. It shows pretty clearly that the 76 percent of stimulus spending through the first four months went to fill in the gaping holes in Medicaid and state budgets. In other words, the stimulus isn't acting like a pole vault lifting job creation above the baseline. It's been acting like a crutch to keep state budgets and payrolls from imploding.