Then I'll get on with things other than Obama's Tuesday night address to Congress. Promise. One more good thing, and one bad, arising from the same passage, below:

Pres. Obama: "Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.  More than 90% of these jobs will be in the private sector - jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges; constructing wind turbines and solar panels; laying broadband and expanding mass transit.

Because of this plan, there are teachers who can now keep their jobs and educate our kids.  Health care professionals can continue caring for our sick.  There are 57 police officers who are still on the streets of Minneapolis tonight because this plan prevented the layoffs their department was about to make.

Because of this plan, 95% of the working households in America will receive a tax cut - a tax cut that you will see in your paychecks beginning on April 1st.

Because of this plan, families who are struggling to pay tuition costs will receive a $2,500 tax credit for all four years of college.  And Americans who have lost their jobs in this recession will be able to receive extended unemployment benefits and continued health care coverage to help them weather this storm."

As I've previously confessed, I'm only hopeful, not really confident, that the big stimulus bill will be worth what it adds to the debt. And I've been bothered by this mantra about 3.5 million jobs that will be "created or saved," because the idea of counting jobs that would otherwise have gone away seems an invitation to creative bookkeeping (and Obama is asking us to see him as a straight-talker and an honest, no-gimmicks bookkeper). Plus, I've heard and read the angry criticism from the right about various alleged boondoggles in the bill. (I gather that many of the earlier boondoggles were eliminated and other boondoggley allegations have been debunked, especially some of the crazy made-up stuff alleged by our own Michele Bachmann.) Still, I don't doubt that a 1,000-page spending bill still has things in it that would reek of something other than careful stewardship.

But in the quoted passage, Obama reassured, in several ways, skeptics who have heard about the bill mostly through the prism of its critics. One, jobs like the Minneapolis police and many classroom jobs clearly would be saved from elimination by this infusion of federal tax dollars. (Less clear what happens to them when the infusion expires but, according to the theory, the economy will recover and state/local budgets will recover too.) I also thought the very concrete undertandable benefits  -- like the extended unemployment benefits and the tax credit to help pay for tuition -- might help people focus on things in the bill that will surely help struggling families.

The thing in the passage that struck me as almost insulting to skeptics was the statement that 90% of the jobs created and saved will be in the private sector. It's true that road and bridge construction workers will technically work for privately-owned construction companies.

That's how stimulus-spending is supposed to work. And if it works to shorten the recession, I'll be glad we did it. But those leery of this big jump in government spending will take little comfort from the private sectorness of the jobs when they remember that the workers will be paid with pass-through federal tax dollars (or perhaps I should say federal debt dollars.