Today, CNN released a pretty discouraging poll revealing that “nearly three out of four Americans think that at least half of the money spent in the federal stimulus plan has been wasted”:

Twenty-one percent of people questioned in the poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted, with 24 percent feeling that most money has been wasted and an additional 29 percent saying that about half has been wasted. Twenty-one percent say only a little has been wasted and 4 percent think that no stimulus dollars have been wasted.

This isn’t all that surprising, considering the false claims that conservatives have bandied about for months regarding the stimulus, including Senator-elect Scott Brown’s (R-MA) recent assertion that it “failed to create one new job.” As Steve Benen put it, “Congressional Republicans have invested considerable energy over the last year in trying to convince the country that economic recovery efforts were a mistake.”

But according to a new survey of economists in USA Today, the stimulus has done a lot for unemployment, and, in fact, “the government still needs to do more to breathe life into the economy”:

Unemployment would have hit 10.8% — higher than December’s 10% rate — without Obama’s $787 billion stimulus program, according to the economists’ median estimate. The difference would translate into another 1.2 million lost jobs. But almost two-thirds of the economists said the government should do more to spur job growth.

Discussion about the stimulus has tended to focus on little accounting errors, which miss the big picture, or on faulty analyses that fundamentally distort how the package was designed. But economists have consistently found that the stimulus package is working exactly as it should, and that it is simply too small to counteract the economic crisis.

With the facts so obscured, I agree with the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson that Obama should defend the recovery act in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. “He needs to remind Americans where the stimulus money went, how future stimulus spending will target joblessness even more exactly, and why health care reform fits into the narrative of our long term economic recovery,” Thompson wrote.

Also, as Senate Democrats get around to unveiling their jobs bill, they’d do well to remember that economists think more needs to be done to boost the economy. Yes, Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they want no part of a jobs bill (Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is continuing the disingenuous practice of purposefully conflating job creation with the bank bailouts), and deficit fearmongering is in vogue at the moment. But high lingering unemployment will translate into an economic and political mess for which the party in power will be blamed. As Matthew Yglesias put it, “you don’t need an economic policy that people approve of, you need an economic policy that produces results people approve of — i.e., growth and jobs.”

As part of his theatrical flirtation with a run for New York’s Senate seat, former congressman Harold Ford Jr. had an op-ed in today’s New York Times, in which he said that Democrats “need to shift attention away from health care and toward a bold effort to create jobs, improve the economy and rein in the size of government.” Ford laid out four steps that he believes “we must take immediately to put us, and the nation, on a better course”:

We can start by giving any companies that are less than five years old an exemption from payroll taxes for six months; extending the current capital gains and dividend tax rates through 2012; giving permanent tax credits for businesses that invest in research and development; and reducing the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent…Finally, we need to address budget deficits now rather than waiting for some ideal future economic situation…By focusing on job creation and deficit reduction, we can expand our economy and balance the budget.

As Paul Krugman pointed out, the economic vision Ford outlines “has to set some kind of new standard for cluelessness.” Indeed, Ford’s op-ed is based on a total contradiction: he advocates a slew of supply-side tax cuts (including a big cut in the corporate tax rate) that would balloon the deficit, while laying out nothing in terms of real steps toward deficit reduction, beyond paying lip service to a commission that would recommend some spending cuts.

The cost of the corporate tax cut alone would be about $1 trillion over ten years, or $100 billion per year. As for extending the current capital gains and dividends rates, which are a product of the Bush tax cuts, a similar move in 2008 (which extended the rates through 2010) cost about $51 billion, with more than half of the benefit going to the richest 0.2 percent of households.

As Matthew Yglesias put it, “to make the deficit smaller, you can’t also make revenues smaller. The math isn’t difficult.” Mark Thoma, meanwhile, labeled Ford’s job-creation ideas the “same old tired set of supply side tax cuts that we always hear, most of which only work in the long-run if they work at all”:

To the extent that there would be any job creation effects from these tax cut policies, and some types of tax cuts could help a bit, they are likely to be more than offset by the deficit reduction and his other policy recommendations that work in the opposite direction. Does [Ford] really think voters will reward Democrats for making unemployment worse through deficit reduction? With friends like these, who needs Republicans?

Ford is yet another deficit peacock, professing his concerns about the deficit while not advocating any serious steps to get long-term deficits under control. As Michael Linden wrote, “peacocks prefer scoring political points to solving problems.” And an attempt to score political points is all that Ford’s op-ed amounts to.