IBD
The White House now claims that its various stimulus and bailout efforts have "saved or created" 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs. If so, they must have been created not in the United States, but in Fantasyland.
We hate to be negative, but the claims made by the administration's top economists are ludicrous. The U.S. economy has struggled for more than a year and a half under Obamanomics and is no better for it.
The ugly truth is, U.S. businesses have shed 3.1 million jobs since Obama took over. That's a hard fact from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not an imaginary number, like those the White House just released.
It isn't hard to understand why a new CBS News poll shows just 13% of Americans believe that Obama's plans have helped the economy. People aren't fooled by the clouds of rhetoric emanating from the mouths of Democratic politicians; they know the real story is that official unemployment is at 9.5%, and not below 8%, as White House advisers promised in 2009 if the stimulus was passed.
How can the White House so blithely produce such a nonsense jobs estimate? Driven by political desperation as their favorability ratings slip, they've cooked the numbers.
Writing on the National Review's blog, the redoubtable Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, notes the job estimate is based on an economic fallacy: that government spending creates more economic activity than it consumes.
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The reality is every dollar the government spends costs the economy in terms of output. We're seeing that now. The "medicine" of stimulus via higher government spending turns out to be poison.
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Obviously the stimulus did not work and making up numbers of "jobs saved" is not going to save the jobs of Democrats who voted for this mess. Despite this poor performance the labor thugs are still backing the Democrats, but the rest of America seems to know the score.
BY Merv Benson
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