OMB Watch is back from the holiday break! I'm personally happy about that, because I have the sense that the new Congress, like the old Congress, is going to provide us lots and lots of good blogging material. Today, I get to put up tortured claims from incoming House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) that teachers and police officers don't have real jobs and that if your private-sector job was ever cut, it never actually really existed as a real job.

Now, you can say those are jobs created or saved. Really, they're simply dollars spent for one year of kicking the can down the road. It didn't create -- there's not a lot of ripple effect in that kind of spending.

Real creation of jobs, permanent jobs is what we didn't get out of this. Of course, you get your money spent. If I hire you and give you a quarter million dollars or $174,000, you have a job for that year. That's not creating a job. That's hiring or continuing to pay for a government worker.

Creating a job is about something you do that becomes permanent. Stimulus should have been about private-sector creation.

Issa tries to argue that 1) government workers, like teachers, aren't actually employed in real jobs; 2) only permanent jobs are real jobs; 3) the Recovery Act did create real, permanent jobs in the private sector; 4) but the Recovery Act didn't create net growth because it wasn't spent "right."

Issa backpedals from his initial claim that the Recovery Act didn't create jobs, because, well, that's a completely incorrect statement. If you think the Obama administration's information is slanted, you can bypass the multiple Council of Economic Advisors reports that indicate the Recovery Act created millions of jobs, and go straight to private economists. They say that it "boosted growth and mitigated job losses" and that "the unemployment rate would probably be closer to 11 percent [without the Recovery Act]."

So, when Issa says the Recovery Act was a "trillion-dollar stimulus that did not create jobs," he actually means it was a trillion-dollar stimulus that did create jobs.