The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Stimulus
“President Barack Obama has had a lot to say in recent days about his new jobs package, though he’s tough to pin down on one important fact: the number of jobs it will create,” The Wall Street Journal reports with magnificent understatement:
Private economists have offered a wide range of estimates, with some saying the plan would have little impact and with others saying it could create between 1.3 million and 1.9 million jobs next year. The White House has avoided offering a public forecast. An earlier prediction that the 2009 stimulus package would hold the unemployment rate below 8% still haunts the administration. The unemployment rate is now 9.1%.
“We just don’t do official job estimates,” Jack Lew, Mr. Obama’s budget director, said this week. Mr. Obama’s jobs plan, he emphasized, will have a positive impact on GDP and job growth.
But the White House is promoting job-creation figures in state-by-state “factsheets.” A review of the state-by-state data shows the White House anticipates Mr. Obama’s plan would generate at least 1.7 million jobs. The White House created the factsheets for local and regional reporters, and has only distributed a few to a wider group of reporters to make the case for the package’s benefits.
A senior Obama administration official said it is misleading to add all of the figures in the state-by-state factsheets because the proposals generate different types of jobs that aren’t comparable.
Wow, that sounds almost honest–essentially an acknowledgment that they have no idea how many jobs if any Stimulus Jr. would create. Reason’s Peter Suderman, reporting on a study by economist Daniel Rothschild, points out that the numbers the administration generated for Stimulus Sr. were equally bogus:
In some cases, for example, firms that received stimulus money were instructed by their federal overseers to count jobs created by taking the total amount of money they were given, divide it by some predetermined per-job salary figure, then report the result as the number of jobs created.
Essentially, they were told to assume in their reports that if they got the money, they created jobs–regardless of whether or not any jobs were actually created.
Meanwhile, the New York Times editorial page reassures its gullible readers: “The problem with the stimulus bill is not that it did not work. The problem is that neither the administration nor Congressional Democrats ever persuasively used the evidence of its positive effect on jobs.”
The Times opines: “For Mr. Obama to win public support for this effort, Americans need to see him attack the Republicans’ opposition and to forcefully get his party in line.” And Obama does seem to be taking the advice and stepping up the vehemence, as evidenced [when he recently said]:
I get fed up with that kind of game plan, and we’ve been seeing it for too long. Too long. We’re in a national emergency. We’ve been grappling with a crisis for three years, and instead of getting folks to rise up above partisanship in a spirit that says we’re all in this together, we got folks who are purposely dividing, purposely thinking just in terms of how does this play out just in terms of this election.
Unemployment has been above 9% for most of Obama’s presidency, and suddenly now “we’re in a national emergency”? The real emergency is that his re-election prospects are dimming, and he wants taxpayers to make a half-trillion-dollar campaign contribution.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
