Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney campaigned with Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who presides over one of the least job-creating states in America, today at Otterbein College — a school that benefited from the passage of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus.

Otterbein received a grant worth more than $80,000 for a federal work-study program in July 2009. Ignoring that fact, though, Romney proceeded to attack the stimulus in his speech to students:

ROMNEY: Then there was the stimulus itself. $787 billion of borrowing. It could have been entirely focused on getting getting the private sector to buy capital equipment, for instance. That puts people to work. Or to hire people. Instead, it primary protected people in the governmental sector, which is probably the sector that should have been shrinking.

Watch it:

Romney also mixed up the facts about the stimulus. In calling the stimulus a hand out for government programs (which he said “probably should have been shrinking”), Romney ignores that the last three years were the worst on record for government job losses. In calling the stimulus a failure, he ignores its obvious successes: It saved or created millions of jobs, turned around economic growth, and pulled the American economy away from the precipice of collapse.

The American economy grew more slowly than expected in the first quarter of 2012, expanding at a rate of 2.2 percent. While the numbers are another illustration that the economic recovery is still on the right track (particularly compared to European countries that have fallen back into recession), they fell short of estimates.

One bright spot of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis report, however, is that the American auto industry is continuing its resurgence and adding to economic growth:

Motor vehicle output added 1.12 percentage points to the first-quarter change in real GDP after adding 0.47 percentage point to the fourth-quarter change.

That the auto industry helped boost economic growth is yet another sign that letting the industry fail — as many Republicans, including presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, wanted to do — would have had disastrous effects on the American economy.

The auto industry rescue, according to some estimates, saved more than one million jobs. Since it was saved, the industry is growing again — its biggest companies are adding jobs, boosting sales, and posting record profits. As today’s report shows, that’s having a sizable impact on America’s economic growth, and it’s translating into job growth as well: in March, nearly 10 percent of the 120,000 jobs added to the economy came from growth in the auto and parts manufacturing sector.

With the nation’s unemployment rate still above eight percent, millions of Americans are looking for work, and the country’s biggest corporations are hiring. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, however, many of those corporations are adding jobs overseas at a faster pace than they are at home. Even worse, others are cutting their domestic workforces while adding jobs in other countries at a rapid pace:

Those companies, which include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., WMT +2.70% International Paper Co., Honeywell International Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc., boosted their employment at home by 3.1%, or 113,000 jobs, between 2009 and 2011, the same rate of increase as the nation’s other employers. But they also added more than 333,000 jobs in their far-flung—and faster-growing— foreign operations.

The companies included in the analysis were the largest of those that disclose their U.S. and non-U.S. employment in annual securities filings. All of them have at least 50,000 employees. Collectively, they employed roughly 6.4 million workers world-wide last year, up 7.7% from two years earlier. Over the same period, the total number of U.S. jobs increased 3.1%, according to the Labor Department.

Many of the companies are adding jobs in the U.S. but adding even more overseas — reversing a trend from a decade ago in which they were outsourcing American jobs to other countries. But some companies, like Wal-Mart, have boosted overseas employment while maintaining flat job growth in the U.S., and others, like UPS, have slashed jobs at home even while adding them in other countries:

A similar Wall Street Journal report last April found that America’s largest multinational corporations outsourced more than 2.4 million jobs over the last decade, even as they cut their overall workforces by 2.9 million.

President Obama has proposed a tax credit to encourage businesses to bring jobs from overseas back to the United States in order to relieve high unemployment and boost economic growth. Republicans and corporations, meanwhile, have blamed outsourcing on high taxes, even though corporations pay less in America than they would in most of the developed world.