“Our balanced approach recognizes that there is no silver bullet, no single thing, that can address the many and complex needs of America’s vast economy,” Biden writes. “The act was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period — not a jolt that would last only a few months.”

“Since when?” asks the office of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), which already has been at work on this balmy Sunday morning looking up some of Biden’s and the president’s earlier comments on the subject.

As recently as June, at a roundtable in New York, Biden called the Recovery Act “an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start.”

In March, the vice president said ”the Recovery Act, as we call it, provides a necessary jolt to our economy to implement what we refer as ‘shovel-ready’ projects.”

And in November, as a new White House in planning was assembling its new economic team, President-elect Barack Obama said: “The most important thing to recognize is that we have a consensus, which is pretty rare, between conservative economists and liberal economists, that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape and that is focused on the 2.5 million jobs that I intend to create during the first part of my administration. We have to put people back to work.