SOUTH DAKOTA STRAIGHT TALK

Straight Talk commentary – On Monday President Obama held another Cabinet Meeting. His first Cabinet Meeting on April 20^th was the fiscal joke of instructing his Cabinet to be fiscally responsible and find $100 million in budget cuts collectively in their departments.

Monday’s Cabinet meeting dubbed Roadmap to Recovery is the continuation of the sham that his Stimulus Packaged rushed thru the Congress in early February is little more than a Democrat big Government giveaway. In January I posted about the so called American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in Stimulus - What Stimulus?:

To be clear our Economy needs a real jump start and stimulus, but to be effective it must put people to work and quickly. The President and Congressional Democrats are using political sleight of hand by saying this “Package” will create or save 3 million jobs. Save jobs? Since they don’t say which jobs they are saving, I guess that means as long as 3 million people are still working – the stimulus package will be a success.

My primary objections are that the funds are not being put to use quickly enough and that overall too little of the money is being used for true stimulus (but rather spending for special projects and more government.)

This Democrat Trojan Horse so called “Stimulus Package” is a sham. It is old time government spending, very little stimulus and way too slow.

The President’s dog and pony show cabinet meeting (note from the picture that the meeting was not held in the Cabinet room at the White House but what appears to be the East Room (though I may be wrong on that) – clearly this was a photo op(porutnity) not serious business. The two important points here are that despite the Administration’s claims the money is not being spent or people being put back to work FAST enough and that little in the Stimulus Bill is real stimulus.

William McGurn’s opinion editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled, “The Media Fall for Phony “Jobs” Claims: McGurn accurately points out that President Obama is spinning his claim that HIS Stimulus Package is working.

At the heat of McGurn’s argument is his assertion –“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%.”

In concert with McGurn and Rosenthal that this is hocus pocus focus, Peter Morici, Professor of International Business at the University of Maryland said, “A lot of this is hokum. All along, (Obama’s) job numbers have kept changing according to the political environment.”

The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims

By: William McGurn

The Wall Street Journal

June 10, 2009

The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction

Tony Fratto is envious.

Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created."

"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 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%.

It's not only former Bush staffers such as Messrs. Fratto and Mankiw who have noted the political convenience here. During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula.

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," said the Montana Democrat. "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

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.

If the "saved or created" formula looks brilliant, it's only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don't expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration's line that the stimulus has already "saved or created" 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.

"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."