There’s yet another angle on the “Is the public too stupid to realize all that the stimulus has done” debate that Adam weighed into earlier this afternoon. Adam and Matt Yglesias took Joe Klein for task for condescending to the the public when it’s the responsibility of the media and other elites to help them understand what the government is doing. But let's remember that this all started because Joe was frustrated that Americans fail to recognize that things like the payroll tax cuts they’ve received and the continued employment of their kids’ teachers are the direct result of the $787 billion stimulus that Congress enacted and President Obama signed last year. But I want to raise another point: The main index by which the public measures the effect of the stimulus is the same index that the press and the experts look to: the rate of unemployment. And what exactly did the stimulus do to prevent it from rising even higher than its current 10 percent (and when all the semi-unemployed are counted in, its current 17 percent)? A survey of 50 economists from today’s USA Today shows that without the stimulus, unemployment would stand at 10.8 percent instead of 10 percent, which means another 1.2 million Americans would now be officially unemployed. That’s a real difference, but when measured against the number and percentage of unemployed, it’s not that big a difference. To get the public to appreciate the stimulus, the stimulus would have had to be much larger – creating or saving 3 or 4 million jobs, not 1.2 million. Whose fault is that? Not the public’s. I’d say it’s Larry Summers’, though there’s ample blame to go around. --Harold Meyerson
