Obama Administration Twisting the Numbers

Having spent literally his entire political career blasting President Bush for eight years of failed policy and the poor state of the economy, President Barack Obama must now come up with a fresh response to the country's financial woes. Soon the president will have been in Washington for one year, and it is getting harder and harder to shift responsibility to the previous administration. This is Obama's economy now, so he has recently pulled out all the stops to ensure that his mammoth $787 billion economic stimulus plan is portrayed as overwhelmingly successful. Last week, the White House claimed that exactly 640,329 jobs have either been 'created or saved' by the stimulus plan. A day later, Vice President Joe Biden proclaimed the actual figure to be 1.5 million jobs 'created or saved,' though there is zero statistical evidence to solidify his claim. I feel this would be an appropriate time to define the term paradox: a paradox is an assertion that exhibits inexplicable or contradictory aspects. Does anyone else see how the concept of saving a lost job makes about as much sense as hearing a deafening silence or consoling the desolate optimist? Being the political masters they are, however, the Obama administration has successfully popularized the notion of a 'saved job.' The only thing worse than the fact that the 'saved job' concept cannot be proven, is that it also cannot be disproven. Yet the fact remains, no one in Washington, including the Treasury, Labor Department, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has ever even attempted to measure a 'saved job.' The real truth is, even the greatest economists of our time understand job creation to be extremely difficult if not impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy. Harvard University economist and former Bush economic advisor Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." He says, "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 The New York Times has grudgingly reported that Mr. Obama's statements on jobs are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." According to most economic statistics, seven million jobs have been lost since the official start of the recession. Roughly five million have been lost since the president took office last January and three million since he signed the stimulus package. This is not to say the president is at fault for these jobs, because most of these losses would have occurred regardless who is sitting in the Oval Office. The issue here is that the president has appealed to an extremely influential political tool that is based on a lie. Any government that spends money can create some jobs and probably save some others. Heck, the government could generate jobs by hiring people to build a bridge, knock it down, and rebuild it. But it is simply not possible to measure a 'saved job!' In addition, these job totals do not take into account those who are simply moving from one job to another. If a person switches from an existing job to another, the new job gained is reported, but the old one that is lost is not. President Obama has not only succeeded in reaping political capital from doing so, but his claims continuously go uncontested by the mainstream media. Since the government released reports on progress of the stimulus plan last week, analysts and non-profits that track federal spending have found numerous instances of inflated numbers and statistical inaccuracies. An example is California State University, which received an enormous $268.5 million of stimulus funds. In a report to the feds, CSU claimed the money allowed them to save 26,156 workers, which would constitute more than half of the school's employees. Just last week however, university officials admitted that they never planned to lay off those workers with or without the boost of the stimulus. Ah yes, money well spent! So as the unemployment rate soars to 10.2 percent, the president continues to justify these massive financial burdens through the use of first-rate distortion and expert exaggeration. Sure enough, the weight of this outrageous spending that may or may not be helping the economy will be felt by us and our children. Stop embellishing your political career, Mr. President, and start actually fixing our mess of an economy.