Today, marks the one year anniversary of the day that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, i.e the stimulus package) was signed into law. So of course, Republicans are marking the occasion by lambasting the act and continuing to falsely claim that it has done nothing to reverse the country’s economic freefall:

– Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN): One year later, one thing is clear: the stimulus bill has failed. One year later, not one net job has been created as unemployment rose from 7.6 percent to nearly 10 percent nationwide. Mr. President, millions of Americans are asking, ‘where are the jobs?’

– Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): In the first year of the trillion-dollar stimulus, Americans have lost millions of jobs, the unemployment rate continues to hover near 10 percent, the deficit continues to soar and we’re inundated with stories of waste, fraud and abuse. This was not the plan Americans asked for or the results they were promised.

– Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): Americans are asking ‘where are the jobs’ but all they are getting from Washington Democrats is more government, more borrowing, and more debt piled on the backs of our kids and grandkids.

– Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA): It’s been a year, and the President and Speaker Pelosi are still trumpeting a stimulus program that most Americans intrinsically know has failed to achieve the goals that were set for it.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee even put together a web video about the stimulus “boondoggle.” But as the New York Times’ David Leonhardt pointed out today, independent analyses tell a quite different story. “Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs,” Leonhardt wrote. “The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.”

The economy also expanded at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 5.7 percent last quarter, much of which can be attributed to the stimulus package.

And of course, as Lee Fang has exhaustively documented, Republicans are not so down on the stimulus when it comes to money sent to their home states and districts. In fact, 110 Republican lawmakers — more than half of the GOP caucus — are “guilty of stimulus hypocrisy.” These include McConnell, who has returned to Kentucky to brag about stimulus projects, and Cantor, who has hosted job fairs populated by stimulus recipients looking to hire.

So the stimulus is doing exactly what it was projected to do, albeit in a worse economy than proponents were predicting at the time. And possibly the worst result of the GOP’s steady stream of misinformation is that it has clouded public perception (with just 6 percent of Americans believing that it has created jobs), which is imperiling new job creation efforts. As of right now, the bills before the Senate are nowhere near ambitious enough to deal with unemployment that is still too high.

Tomorrow, President Obama is expected to formally announce the creation of a commission charged with formulating a plan to address the country’s long-term budget deficits. Obama will reportedly name former Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House official Erskine Bowles as the commission’s chairmen.

When Obama first made his intention to create a deficit commission known and said that he was “agnostic” regarding the proposals that it would consider, many Republicans went on the offensive, claiming that the commission was simply a way to push through tax increases. Instead, the GOP has been advocating for a commission that is explicitly barred from considering taxes and can only focus on cutting spending.

Fortunately, Simpson isn’t buying that argument, and in an interview with the New York Times he “dismissed claims from Republicans that reining in deficits would be easy or accomplished with spending cuts alone”:

“But they don’t cut spending,” he said, citing the administration of President George W. Bush when Republicans also controlled Congress. “Don’t forget the Republicans never vetoed a single bill in six and a half years. How is that for cutting spending?” “To say that all we have to do is take care of waste, fraud and abuse, and foreign aid is a like a sparrow’s belch in the midst of typhoon,” he said. “That is nothing, less than 1 percent of the budget.”

“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Simpson added. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

Simpson is exactly right. Not only are our current deficits overwhelmingly the result of Bush administration policies and the economic downturn (which has seriously depressed tax revenue), but trying to address long-term deficits on the spending side alone can’t be done. Those who blame the deficit on earmarks (which make up less than one percent of the budget) or think that the budget can be balanced by simply freezing spending are, as CAP’s Michael Linden has put it, “peddling fiscal snake oil.”

As former Reagan economic official Bruce Bartlett wrote, “every serious budget analyst — I mean every — knows that revenues must be part of the solution to our deficit problem…[T]he idea that we can or even should embark on serious deficit reduction with no tax increase whatsoever is grossly immature and unworthy of consideration.” But the Republican leadership is still waffling about whether or not it will even agree to name members to the commission, crystallizing its insistence on staying on budget fantasy-land. It’s good to see that, at least, the Republican chairman of the commission is refusing to play the same game.