In his New York Times column yesterday, economist Paul Krugman criticized the “bad faith economics” of those “reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.”

In response, American Enterprise Institute scholar Phil Levy wrote a blog post for Foreign Policy today, calling himself a “Bad Faith Economist” who considers the stimulus plan “bad news” because the proposed spending would occur too slowly.

To back his conclusion, Levy wrote:

If one compared a tax cut now to spending years down the road, then it would be no contest -– tax cuts would win. In fact, that’s pretty much the choice we face. According to press reports of an unreleased CBO study, only $26 billion of $355 billion in new spending would occur in the current fiscal year. Another $110 billion would come in Fiscal 2010. That’s less than 40 percent of the total by September 2010.

We agree that Levy is a bad faith economist, but not for the reason he cited.

The problem is that Levy used numbers from “an unreleased CBO study” that is not an actual study. It was simply “a preliminary calculation of the spending schedule for one portion of the stimulus bill.”

Levy is hardly the only one parading this incomplete report around. ThinkProgress found that the TV media alone cited it 81 times in the last six days, and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times also hopped on board. But Levy’s post is extra laughable because it came out the day after the CBO released its complete assessment of the stimulus plan.

The official CBO analysis of the entire stimulus bill found that it “would cost the federal government about $816 billion over the next 10 years and that approximately $526 billion, or about 65 percent, would be spent by the end of September 2010.” And as Kevin Drum added, “most of the spending that comes in FY2012 or later is either for projects that simply take more than two years to complete (highways, school repairs) or infrastructure improvements that have long-term paybacks (renewable energy programs).”

As CBO Director Doug Elmendorf wrote regarding yesterday’s report, “This is the first cost estimate that CBO has prepared for [the stimulus plan] in its entirety.” Perhaps next time, Levy will take his cues from the actual office that he is citing, instead of Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.

As The Wonk Room has noted before, America needs to reverse its falling rate of educational attainment. Confirming the extent of the problem, ACT has released new data showing that for the last two decades, the rates of retention and graduation at America’s universities have been stagnant. Chart via The Quick and the Ed:

As Chad Aldeman wrote, “Over a period when enrollment increased more than twenty percent, it is the failure of our nation’s colleges and universities to increase student retention and graduation rates that [is] causing our higher education stagnation.”

On MSNBC today, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made an appearance to tout the conservative solution to the economic crisis — corporate tax cuts — and deride some of the infrastructure spending included in the proposed economic recovery package. Anchor Norah O’Donnell, though, was having none of it, pointing out the lack of logic in McCarthy’s assessment:

REP. MCARTHY: Refurbishing a building, putting new grass down in a mall. That doesn’t create buildings. That doesn’t creates jobs.

O’DONNELL: Really? I would think you have to hire somebody to put the new sod down on the National Mall.

Watch it:

O’Donnell was spot on in demolishing the right-wing myth that infrastructure investment won’t create jobs, and that the plan to repair the National Mall means simply spending money on “grass.” It’s common sense that repairing and upgrading roads, bridges, ports, water and sewage systems, electric grids, schools, and yes, the Mall, will require workers. And with the news that American companies announced 55,000 more layoffs yesterday, spurring job creation is even more essential.

Moody’s Economy.com has calculated that “with the stimulus, there will be 4 million more jobs and the jobless rate will be more than 2 percentage points lower by the end of 2010 than [it would be] without any fiscal stimulus.” An analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, meanwhile, found that infrastructure investment creates more than 60,000 jobs for every $10 billion spent, versus just 10,000 jobs for every $10 billion spent on a corporate tax cut.

There is one thing that McCarthy got right, though. Putting down sod does not, in fact, create buildings.