Stimulating NewMath

Not only has the stimulus led to a massive number of new jobs, apparently its led to an Orwellian rethinking of the science of mathematics.

In 2009, the Obama regime told us that, without the stimulus, our workforce would shrink to 133.9 million jobs.

Well, 14 months into the stimulus, we now have 129.7 million jobs - not surprising really, since the stimulus was aimed at everything but the creation of new jobs in the private sector.

And yet . . . the Obama Administration, but a few days ago, claimed that the stimulus "created or saved" 2.8 million jobs.

So lets see . . . . 133.9 - 129.7 = 4.2 million less jobs . . . . [erase] . . . hmmm, maybe if I carry the 2 and divide by the square root of Obama's I.Q. . . . nope . . . . jeez, I just don't understand this new math . . . .

As Big Government points out, to get to the Obama administration's 2.8 million jobs created or saved, the administration had to subtract 7 million jobs from their 2009 baseline of what the workforce would been without the stimulus. That is new math indeed.

The reality is that, for all practical purposes, the only thing the Obama stimulus actually saved were public sector jobs and some very small, very limited jobs in the quasi-private sector that deal with green energy and/or that rely on government contracts. That means nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars that could have gone to stimulate the private sector was wasted. The vast majority of the jobs attribuatable to the stimulus are in the public sector that, itself, produces no new wealth.

Thus, in the words of that iconic American philosopher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "America's chickens are coming home to roost." The public sector, having survived a year on borrowed Obama-money, is now now facing deep cuts. So will the Obama administration begin subtracting those "saved or created" public sector jobs now getting the axe. Actually, even that doesn't begin to accurately reflect what the stimulus has cost the nation. That three quarters of a trillion dollars that mostly went to prop up the pulbic sector has to be analyzed in terms of the lost opportunity costs had we used the stimulus to help create permanent private sector jobs. Somehow, I think that it would take one hell of a lot of NewMath to make that number look good from the left's perspective.

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Illusion, Jobs & A Media-Love

Jobless claims are going up and up. Obama told us they would top out at 8% if only we would sign his stimulus check without bothering to read the bill. That was four months ago. Today, unemployment stands at 9.4% and no one is making any projections to suggest it won't hit double digits. Yet we are repeatedly told by Obama that his stimulus plan has saved or created hundreds of thousands of jobs. How to reconcile these two? Its simple - Obama is spinning more fiction than Dan Brown, and the sycophantic MSM is printing it word for word without challenge.

This from the WSJ:

. . . "Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."

Mr. Fratto [who worked in the Bush White House] sees a double standard at play. "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create,'" he tells me. "To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it."

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula "save or create" allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." And on his blog, he acknowledges the political attraction.

"The expression 'create or save,' which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius," writes Mr. Mankiw. "You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus."

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

. . . Now, something's wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It's true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn't tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.

. . . "You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama's jobs claims that they did toward President Bush's tax cuts," says Mr. Fratto. "But I'm still waiting."

We are in serious trouble, and smoke and mirrors will only hide it for so long. You can see my post below that covers both the jobless claims and the MSM's wholesale dereliction of duty as part of the larger and dire economic problems that we face. Obama came to power saying that he wanted to "transform" the economy. What he is transforming it into is something that will more closely resemble Zimbabwe than the post-WWII economy of the past half century.

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