Baum: Obama's Stimulus Spin is an Embarrassment

[Guest]

RUSH: Caroline Baum. "Caroline Baum, author of 'Just What I Said,' is a Bloomberg News columnist." She's written a piece entitled: "Obama Omits Jobs Killed or Thwarted from Tally." This piece, this piece, folks, is a triple play of teachable moments. It's an opinion piece. It is about how nothing is real, which I have pointed out constantly. It's about how Obama has to keep saying he supports business when he doesn't, and it adds in how he's not really a pro-education president, either. "Can you believe they're still touting that silly metric" jobs created, jobs saved. "When I heard last week that the White House would be announcing the number of 'jobs created or saved' ... my first reaction was embarrassment" as it should be for any real economist, and Caroline's point is this: If you are a going to fantasize about jobs created or saved as Vice President Bite Me and Obama do, you have to subtract jobs destroyed or prevented.

You can't have it just one way. "Imagine how Christina Romer must feel. The chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors was dressed in a cheery, salmon-colored jacket, a complement to the upbeat news she had to deliver on July 14. The $787 billion stimulus enacted in February 2009, which subsequently grew to $862 billion, increased gross domestic product by 2.7 percent to 3.4 percent relative to where it would have been, and added anywhere from 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs compared with an ex-stimulus baseline. 'By this estimate, the Recovery Act has met the president's goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs -- two quarters earlier than anticipated,' Romer said with a straight face.

"(More than 2.5 million non-farm jobs have been lost since [the Reform Act] was enacted in February 2009, all of them in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)" and yet they still talk about jobs created or saved. "How does the CEA arrive at these numbers? It uses two methods, Romer said. The first is a standard macroeconomic forecasting model that estimates the multiplier effect of fiscal policy."

Look, I don't need to read this whole thing. What Caroline Baum does here in this piece is a great job of breaking down economic theory and reality into easy-to-understand nuggets of common sense. She outlines all these models, these Ivy League models that the Bam regime depends on to make economic decisions -- or at least to fool Americans that what they're doing is good. But none of it's real. It's just like all these global warming models: None of it's real. They're plugging numbers into models and theories they have sat around discussing in the faculty lounge and they are saying that all of the things they're doing are working when they're not working because they theorized they would work. Nothing is real. It's all made up. It's all a mirage. While we are losing jobs, while we are hemorrhaging money, the administration says they've saved or created 3.5 million jobs and it would have been even worse if they hadn't acted! It's fraud. It's a total lie. A 100% disconnect between the regime and reality.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_072110/content/01125104.guest.html

[Guest]

That's right dgrimm.