Well, that’s not precisely what he claimed. At least, not in his own words. But it probably should be. Explains Geoff at Innocent Bystanders:

[…] if you read the report, does it truly say that the “financial rescue and stimulus” were responsible for “saving or creating 8.5 million jobs?” Not really. The report actually places most of the credit on the changes in financial policy & TARP.

And in fact, though the authors wax enthusiastically over the ARRA stimulus, the calculations in the report show that the stimulus package was hugely inefficient and wasteful.

[…]

According to Blinder & Zandi, we’ve spent $391 billion in stimulus money in “now” dollars, to get a GDP increase of $340 billion (in 2005 dollars), so we lost $51 billion. Lost $51 billion. If you adjust for inflation, it only cost us about $10 billion, but the point is that rather than spending the money in a way that has a big economic multiplier, it’s been spent with a economic multiplier less than 1.

They also tell us that their modeling predicts that the stimulus itself was responsible for 2.5 million jobs. If you simply take that at face value, and divide it into the $391 billion spent thus far, you find that each job cost us more than $150K. Yep – each job over that 18 month period cost us $100K/yr.

Reached for comment, Ezra Klein (“Zandi: Financial rescue and stimulus responsible for saving or creating 8.5 million jobs”) responded by pointing out he could cite lots of liberal commentators — from the media, the Obama administration, as well as professors from J-schools and law schools — who interpreted the original report nearly exactly as he had. Oftentimes using the very same words and phrases to describe it!

So.