GOP Unhappy with Conservative Economic Recovery

President Obama's polling numbers are up concerning his handling of the economy.

As TPM points out this is bad for Mitt Romney:

Thursday morning brought the news that weekly jobless claims were down to their lowest level since March 2008. General Motors, which survived only because of a government bailout (that Romney opposed), posted its largest annual profit in history. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics released data this week showing that new housing starts are picking up, moving away from the December slowdown. True, the economy is far from fully healthy or at full recovery, but continuing good economic news will make Romney’s message a harder sell.

And despite GOP protestations that the nation is being led by a Kenyan, atheist, communist, anti-colonialist the recovery is actually conservative in nature. As Matthew Yglesias incessantly points out the entirety of job growth is coming from the private sector while public sector employment (teachers, police officers, firefighters) continue to contract.

Paul Krugman takes this analysis one step further and points out that if the federal government simply helped state and local governments keep their employment numbers constant with population growth that would be tantamount to one million to three million more jobs.

This suggests to me that we could put well over a million people to work directly, and probably around 3 million once you take other effects into account, without any need to come up with new projects; just transfer enough money to state and local governments to let them return to doing the essential business of government, like educating our children.