Obama Promises to “Save” Jobs Again
Is there anyone actually stupid enough to fall for this again?
President Barack Obama said on Monday accelerated stimulus spending would create or save 600,000 jobs over the next 100 days, pledging action to slow the growth of unemployment that has reached a 25-year high.
“Create or save.” Rrrrright. And Western ‘journalists’ just copy and paste whatever it is Obama says in a statement emailed to them, and ‘forget’ to point out that it’s difficult if not impossible to check whether a government did indeed “save” a specific amounts of jobs or not.
Luckily there are hundreds – nay, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions – of bloggers out there willing to set the record straight and educate the public.
Still. The fact that both Obama and his ‘journalist’ friends are trying to get away with this scam is troubling.
And even if they do succeed in proving the stats, there’s this little problem they’ll have to deal with:
Even if, somehow, they manage to name names, so to speak, then demonstrate how the saving of 150,000 jobs when 2,900,000 jobs have been lost this year alone is a wise expenditure of nearly $800,000,000,000 dollars. (Yes, I know that not all of the funds have been expended yet, but the point is a valid one.) Let’s see, the back of the envelope calculation shows that something like 5% of the total potential job losses were “saved” by the stimulus. If all of the dollars in the stimulus had been spent to save those jobs it would have cost a mere $5.33 million for each job.
GREAT work if you can get it. The rest of you, tough luck.
Furthermore:
Complete administration fiction about the benefits of the massive Obama “stimulus” aside, I’d really like them to explain why unemployment right now is higher than the White House projections claimed they would be without any stimulus bill at all. That’s the real story here.
As if that’s not bad enough, Erick Erickson adds that most of the ’stimulus money’ disappears in public and private bureaucracies.
Anybody still wondering why it is that a majority of voters now disapprove of Obama’s budget plans?
The gap between the WH’s own projections and the current reality is a huge problem for them. I really don’t think Obama will continue to get away with the claim of ’saving’ jobs much longer because when you match up the timeline of the WH projections (which were used to justify the stimulus spending) and how we’re currently doing, it’s clear that things are already worse than his own team’s forecasts, with or without the stimulus.
We’re at a crossroads where you can start to see even some in the liberal media and blogosphere realizing they won’t be able to defend this for much longer. And as pointed out here, when unemployment officially hits 10% (which I think is inevitable, probably this summer), no one except the most ardent partisan watercarriers is going to be able to defend the claim of having ’saved jobs.’
That’s when they just continue the path that works.
Blame Bush
And now – more of don’t look at what the left hand is doing.
Oh so NOW he wants to practice restraint.
paygo = tax & spend
Re the ‘paygo’ meme…sounds like the Blue Dogs are starting to rebel and Obama has to pay lip service to their favorite talking point.
Wow, did you actually write all of that or is it a cut and paste of talking points, Aluceo?
I’ll tackle one of the more easily shot down points here:
If we had really been on track for that rate of job loss before the stimulus passed, then why wasn’t that what the administration forecasted when it sold the plan? Their forecasts showed unemployment rising to 8.8% by the current time without the stimulus, and pretended that the stimulus would have already had an effect to reduce that to
Instead, we’re already at a HIGHER rate of unemployment than what the administration had forecast without a stimulus plan passage.
There’s simply no way to claim that jobs have been saved, when we’ve already lost MORE jobs than we expected to lose without a stimulus. I won’t try to claim cause and effect that the stimulus has made things even worse than they would have been without it, but the claims that it is working are laughable.
“I’ll tackle one of the *more* easily shot down points”
Heh, painting the entire text with a negative brush without having to make the effort of tackling more than one point, and then faultily extrapolating from the weakness of that point. Clever.
“There’s simply no way to claim that jobs have been saved, when we’ve already lost MORE jobs than we expected to lose without a stimulus. I won’t try to claim cause and effect that the stimulus has made things even worse than they would have been without it”
This, OTOH, I can fully agree with.
Sorry, Kastanj, but I don’t have time to refute all of it and much of it is just breathy, unfalsifiable stuff about consumer confidence.
The old “I’ll save millions of jobs” charade?
Can’t presidents think up something new to say? *Yawn*
Christine;
I still say the crossroads is several years down the road (i.e. 2011) We Americans have short memories
The left moves in, removes 8 years of dust on the for sale sign.