Governors: More Stimulus Please!

Crediting federal stimulus money with rescuing thousands of public and private-sector workers from layoffs, a number of governors are hoping that future jobs bills will look to again help states avoid painful cuts. “I say to myself, this is terrific, and anyone that says that it hasn’t created jobs, they should talk to the 150,000 people who have been getting jobs in California,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said in an interview on ABC. “We could fill every baseball stadium in the country with people who got jobs or whose job was saved by the stimulus,” Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell told The New York Times. A number of Republican governors have denounced the stimulus, but some conceded that it nonetheless had helped their state even if they disagreed with the legislation. “State government has benefited from the stimulus package, because it’s poured in billions of dollars,” Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi told Fox News, but added that he believed a better bill "could have created twice as many jobs with half as much money.”