Heh, I’m economically illiterate so I can’t really dive too deeply, my water wings will bring me back up to the surface.
So when the website claimed that it had created or saved jobs, it was lying. These are just temporary - not saved at all.
So, we’ve borrowed $787 billion and spent it on, basically, nothing. There will be no increase in productivity that will lead to higher tax revenues - it was just makework. We might just as well have hired people to dig holes and fill them up again.
Obama seems to have based his plan on the broken window fallacy, but given that he has no business experience, that is not surprising.
This is quite a stupid thing to say - did you really think it was going to work?
Obama puts out a lying website bragging about all the jobs his insanely irresponsible squandering of borrowed money has saved and created. The jobless rate continues to rise. In other words, Obama is an economic idiot and not fit for the high office he holds.
Of course, that only will be important to someone who can think rationally about economics, so Obama worshippers will continue to soil his shoes with their slobber.
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan What I find interesting about this is that it’s the perfect place to showcase the core narrative that government fucks everything up, and yet you prefer the narrative that Obama is a liar to being able to support the central thesis of modern conservatism.
I always enjoy when people abandon their core principles in order to favor identity politics.
It’s not that the government fucks a lot of shit up! No, Obama is infallible, anything that happens on his watch must be intentional because he’s the ubermensch!
I am glad that you at least respect Obama, moreso than probably liberal on this board in fact.
It’s not the broken window fallacy. It’s the “if people have some kind of jobs, even makework, they keep buying stuff, thus keeping demand from artificually collapsing, thus keeping suppliers from going out of business, thus keeping the economy from imploding quite as badly” fallacy. Keep up.
In spite of the budget surplus and housing boom left us by Bush. It’s fucking criminal. Why can’t Obama get that tax cuts and reduced govt spending is the only way out of this mess?
you know what? just like our previous president, it can be very easily argued that engaging in course of action X prevented the occurrence of Y, even though item Z didn’t happen according to plan. And that was enough for the bunch of you the last time we spent a lot of government money to accomplish a goal.
Bush: Iraq wasn’t a failure because we have successfully prevented terrorism. But we didn’t find any WMDs
Omama: Stimulus wasn’t a failure because we have successfully prevented depression-style GDP reductions. But we didn’t create 8,000,000,000 jobs as we previously thought.
so all of you righties can go away now.
No, but again you don’t want to know the right answer. I’ll say it anyway. A saved job is one, like a teacher or such, that was going to be laid off because of budget cuts. The stimulus money saved many state jobs (teachers, govt. workers and police) from being cut due to budget cuts. State revenue is way down because tax revenue is way down. Because there was a recession.
If you don’t know this, you should really make an effort to educate yourself before going off half-cocked in ignorance.
No, we have sped up the recovery, because people with jobs use their wages to spend. Which increases demand. Which makes businesses ramp up production. Which makes businesses hire people back. This is utterly simple and if you don’t understand basic economics, you really have no business complaining about it in this forum.
Not the broken window fallacy. The broken window fallacy would be analogous if we were in good economic times and he was creating make-work jobs. However, we are in the mother-of-all-recessions (or rather were) so make work jobs pump money into the system that keeps the engines of business running and stops a deflationary spiral.
Again, very basic stuff and you can’t be bothered to educate yourself on it.
Regardless what Obama is, you are certainly not qualified to denigrate anyone’s economic knowledge.
In any case, 600k jobs lost a month when he took over. 200k jobs lost a month now. He has slowed the descent. I’m sure you understand that, you just want to score political points regardless of the facts.
A little shrill don’t you think? 
Time out for both of you.
And when there’s a story on the news about a firefighter saving someone’s life, that’s all lies, too. All of those people are going to die eventually, anyway.
The next mystery is why it cost $25,000 per job.
They got 130,000 reports. They are in the process of checking the info out. It is a pretty big job. If you get that many reports ,some will be wrong. They have found 70 with mistakes like that so far.
The errors on Recovery.gov, which looks more like clerical errors, is not the real problem. And it’s not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the gross manipulation of ‘jobs’ data that the Obama administration is engaging in.
First, they rigged the game right from the beginning by including ‘jobs saved’ as a metric - something that is impossible to measure. For example, let’s say a school is facing a $500,000 shortfall. That’s ten teacher salaries, or the cost of a new gymnasium renovation. The school planned on the renovation, and had no intention of firing any teachers, but now can’t do it. But wait! All they have to do is claim that they can save ten teacher jobs, and they can get stimulus money. So, they get the money, report that 10 teachers salaries were saved, and they get their gym reno. The jobs were never at risk in the first place, but the books were cooked to make it look that way.
This is not a small factor. Any organization that was planning on any kind of budget cut could claim that jobs were ‘saved’, even if the jobs were never at risk. Just decide, <wink wink> that you need whatever you had planned to buy more than you need the teachers. So we have absolutely no idea how many real jobs, if any, were actually saved.
Then, they set up an incentive system that encourages everyone who gets government money to over-state the number of jobs that were created. Then, because the big numbers make their case look better, they passed those numbers straight on to the public without really doing any checking into their veracity. Now they’ve been caught at it, and they’re madly ‘revisiting’ and downsizing their jobs estimates.
But the worst fallacy about the ‘jobs created’ statistic is that it doesn’t even consider jobs that may have displaced private sector jobs, any negative effects from borrowing a trillion dollars (crowding out private capital, devaluing the dollar, increasing uncertainty about the future, private reductions in investment due to the permanent income theory).
Consider this: my company bids for a job that will employ five workers. I lose the contract to another entity that underbid me because they got stimulus money, or perhaps I was going to be doing a job for the government, but now they’ve decided to hire within because they got stimulus money. No net jobs were created - five workers were needed no matter which ones got hired - but by the crazy accounting of the Obama administration’s plan, five jobs were ‘created’ by the stimulus.
Economists also agree that you can’t simply borrow 800 billion dollars without it having some immediate effect on the economy. The permanent income hypothesis says that economic actors plan their decisions not on their current income, but on their estimate of what their future income will be. Businesses know that this money is coming back out of the economy in the form of higher taxes in the future, so they cut back now. If the borrowing is high enough to destabilize the dollar, then we have more negative effects. If the government demand for capital crowds out private demand, it constrains investment in the private sector.
Then there’s the uncertainty injected into the economy. No one knows where or when the stimulus money will land, so businesses find it harder to make future plans. Venture capitalists scale back their investments because the risk premium has increased.
The effects of all this are real, but impossible to quantify. But the Obama administration assigns a cost of ZERO jobs on the other side of the balance sheet. By their logic, if they taxed every dollar out of the private sector and spent it in the public sector, they would create millions and millions of new jobs. But I guess they’d be completely confused as to how job creation can be going so swimmingly while the unemployment rate continues to climb. A real conundrum, that.
Hey look, it’s the amateur economist variety hour.
For example:
Alabama stimulus job numbers don’t add up
Newspaper report finds stimulus spending in Michigan has created ‘virtually no jobs’
Stimulus job boost in state exaggerated, review finds
MSNBC: 30,000 stimulus jobs figure is way off the mark - Government overstated figures by thousands, review of documents shows
Newspaper: Stimulus brings few private sector jobs.
Georgia - Stimulus jobs overstated
I could go on all day. Just google “stimulus jobs errors”, and have fun reading about the complete mess that the stimulus jobs reporting has become.
And that’s still not considering the anti-growth effects.
Hey look, it’s the ad-hominem glurge variety hour from Mr. “I don’t have anything useful to add to this discussion.”
Sam Stone has a point. It’s really not possible to predict how many more jobs would have been lost without stimulus money, so anyone who claims to know what would have happened without the stimulus is just making shit up. Sam does it himself with the “ten teachers” analogy, and Obama does it with the “jobs saved” statistics.
Here’s how I see it. We need more money in the economy immediately. 50% of the wealth of this country was destroyed in a matter of months. There is no such thing as inflation in that situation. We tried giving a whole bunch of money to a whole bunch of banks, hoping they’d spread it around for us. They didn’t. I’d rather the government give a bunch of money to the people who actually buy things than dump it into the pockets of the super-rich. Why are people so much more critical of this stimulus than of the bank bailouts?
Joe Biden was on The Daily Show last night. He said there were about 70 people who filled out their reports incorrectly, naming nonexistent districts and such. It’s a nuisance, but really quite minor compared to the overall size of the program.
I was wondering that myself… “30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending” doesn’t sound like all that much of a “success story” to me.
Well, if Joe Biden said it, it must be true. He’d never have any kind of incentive to exaggerate the number of jobs created by the stimulus.
I’m only reporting that he said it. I don’t doubt his incentive to spin it as favourably as possible, but it’s not pinging my “bullshit” sensor since I can easily imagine people screwing up while filling out government forms, regardless of what party that government is or the nature of the government program involved.