Jobs saved or created in congressional districts that don't exist.

[emacknight]

@Sam_Stone

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.

This statement would have a lot more meaning if you had championed yourself as a watchdog for “gross manipulation” during the Bush era. Instead, it comes across as just the ramblings of a guy that hates Obama and left. When I see you critical of the Harper government, without blaming the “coalition,” you’ll gain some respect.

@Sam_Stone

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.

(bolding mine)

So by your own admission, within your own scenario, the school had a budget shortfall and was going to stop the gym reno in order to avoid firing teachers. Was that a correct interpretation of what you said? My following statement is based on that premise, so correct if me that was mistaken:

There was a recession, the school had a budget shortfall, so they were going to halt the gym reno. JOBS WOULD HAVE BEEN LOST. Not made up government jobs and not make work jobs. There was an actual plan to have construction work done, and that would have been canceled. Canceling that project has secondary affects beyond the people doing the work, they would have needed materials (wood, nails, paint). So now those materials aren’t bought, costing someone profits, which is when there are more layoffs. In theory, it was semi-local contractors buying stuff at a local Home Depot (or similar) which would mean layoffs within the same school district area, causing MORE budget shortfalls.

If the stimulus money prevented that from happening, then it did what it was supposed to do. But all of this assumes that there was, or was going to be, a recession. If you don’t believe that there was going to be a recession, or that there would have been budget shortfalls, then none of this will make sense, it looks like the government just spending money willy-nilly.

@Sam_Stone

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 intond their veracity. Now they’ve been caught at it, and they’re madly ‘revisiting’ and downsizing their jobs estimates.

That’s just a lot of anti-government ravings. To that I’ll say, “what if we all just agree there are WMDs, wink wink, and then agree there is an al quaeda connection, wink wink, and that this massive increase in house prices will never end, wink wink, and that tax cuts for the wealthy are the same as tax cuts for everyone wink wink, and that a weekend without a terrorist act is a terrorist act prevented, wink wink.”

@Sam_Stone

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).

(bolding mine) If you notice the Dow Jones Industrial Index from August on wards, you see a very steep loss in investment, BEFORE all of this. The stimulus didn’t cause the recession. There are many side effects to medications, but to say that chemo sucks because

@Sam_Stone

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.

If there was going to be a recession, BOTH companies would have lost those bids, perhaps to the school mentioned above.

Tell me something, in your hypothetical, if you’re company lost the bid, and had no income, would it have to cut staff? Would you call that a job loss?

Now, if the government stepped in to make sure you didn’t lose that bid, would that have saved a job?

@Sam_Stone

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.

I don’t think it’s a wise thing for you to say “what businesses know.” You don’t know what businesses want or know. There is no such thing as “businesses,” they are not a unified and homogeneous group. There will be companies that fail in times of uncertainty, and there will be companies that thrive. And the statement that they can’t make plans become of government intervention is completely and utter BS. There is no certainty in life or in business. And government has been adding to that uncertainty ever since there was government and business. Trying to pin it on a liberal government makes you look like a partisan hack. If a Republican government suddenly cut taxes that is a huge intervention that companies couldn’t predict.

Businesses also don’t know if borrowed money will result in higher taxes, perhaps it come come as a reduction in spending. Or perhaps the government will find an alternate source of income. Or maybe it will be a Republican president next that will CUT taxes in spite of a deficit. I remember being told a few years ago that cutting taxes increases tax revenue, so isn’t that still true?

@Sam_Stone

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.

Welcome to life in business and venture capital, is this your first time learning about it? Were you under the assumption that there was certainty? You write as if there wasn’t a massive housing bubble burst followed by a financial meltdown. Was that Obama’s fault as well?

@Sam_Stone

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.

No, they are very easy to quantify. And arguing a ridiculous extreme like, “if they taxed every dollar out of the private sector” also makes you look crazy. I can also make crazy statements like, “what if they cut all taxes and government services and let business do what ever it wanted, and was then shocked when it turned into absolute chaos.” Crazy doesn’t gain you any points. Neither does arguing at an extreme.

The very simple fallacy in your argument is that you’re trying to apply boom-time economic principles to a recession. So you were correct when you said that a government stimulus would cause you to lose that bid ASSUMING BOOM-TIMES.

The Obama administration assumed it was, or was going to be, a recession. That means YOU BOTH LOSE THE CONTRACT. So they applied recession based economic principles which states that the government can have a positive impact by increasing spending DURING A RECESSION.

[Shodan]

@begbert2

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.

That is the broken window fallacy. Obama is taking money away from taxpayers (or, more properly, borrowing it, which means taking even more money away later on to pay back the money plus interest) and using it for makework jobs. This does not increase demand - the taxpayers lose out on the ability to buy with the money the government has taken away from them as much or more than those with the makework jobs gain.

At best, you are postponing the problem as well as making it worse.

Regards,
Shodan

[emacknight]

@Shodan

That is the broken window fallacy. Obama is taking money away from taxpayers (or, more properly, borrowing it, which means taking even more money away later on to pay back the money plus interest) and using it for makework jobs. This does not increase demand - the taxpayers lose out on the ability to buy with the money the government has taken away from them as much or more than those with the makework jobs gain.

At best, you are postponing the problem as well as making it worse.

Regards,
Shodan

It is not a broken window fallacy, you need to stop dragging that into every economic discussion that you don’t understand. There are very real criticisms of the current economic policies, broken window fallacy is not one of them.

The government is borrowing money in lean times, to be repaid in boom times. It is an extremely common and well used practice. The government does it, businesses does it, people do it. You probably did it last week without realizing it.

It needs to be said again, the conservative right complaining now makes them look stupid and out of touch. For 8 years the Bush administration ran up a deficit during a major boom time. Waging two wars is an actual example of broken window fallacy. Add up how many $30,000 bombs they dropped over the past 8 years, that is money gone, poof, borrowed from the tax payer, and now it’s gone. Leaving only a crater and some shell fragments.

So for you to be shocked and outraged that government wasted $25,000 to keep someone employed for a year makes you look like a giant tool.

If you could actually put things into context, and say, “holy shit, we’re in a recession and need to increase government spending domestically, let’s stop wasting in overseas” I’d have a lot more respect for your position.

In the end, your character speaks louder than your words.

[Gangster_Octopus]

@Shodan

That is the broken window fallacy. Obama is taking money away from taxpayers (or, more properly, borrowing it, which means taking even more money away later on to pay back the money plus interest) and using it for makework jobs. This does not increase demand - the taxpayers lose out on the ability to buy with the money the government has taken away from them as much or more than those with the makework jobs gain.

At best, you are postponing the problem as well as making it worse.

Regards,
Shodan

How do know they are “makework” jobs? A lot of the money is being spent on infrastrucutre that has been woefully neglected. The Stimulus is a large, wide-ranging spending package that likley happens to have some “makework” spending and some necessary spending.

[Voyager]

@Shodan

That is the broken window fallacy. Obama is taking money away from taxpayers (or, more properly, borrowing it, which means taking even more money away later on to pay back the money plus interest) and using it for makework jobs. This does not increase demand - the taxpayers lose out on the ability to buy with the money the government has taken away from them as much or more than those with the makework jobs gain.

At best, you are postponing the problem as well as making it worse.

Regards,
Shodan

Please give a cite on the number of jobs that the stimulus package creates or saves that are makework. Near me, it is paying for road improvement, which is only makework if you consider all road maintenance makework. Keeping teachers from being laid off is not make work. Spending money on improving the energy efficiency of homes is not make work either. Perhaps your ideology blinds you into thinking that anything the government does is useless; but that is your problem, not ours.

BTW, anyone ever analyzing a big chunk of data knows about entry errors. It is prevalent even when the data entry people are trained. Data mining books have whole chapters on dealing with this problem. If there weren’t any errors like this, it would be a sign that the data had been fabricated.

[gonzomax]

@Sam_Stone

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.

That is balanced with your sources that want desperately to understate them. You love to quote statistics like they are actual data instead of propaganda. The Dems would like to have great big numbers. The Repubs want to underplay. It is politics.The truth is somewhere in the middle.

[Kearsen]

@emacknight

It is not a broken window fallacy, you need to stop dragging that into every economic discussion that you don’t understand. There are very real criticisms of the current economic policies, broken window fallacy is not one of them.

The government is borrowing money in lean times, to be repaid in boom times. It is an extremely common and well used practice. The government does it, businesses does it, people do it. You probably did it last week without realizing it.

It needs to be said again, the conservative right complaining now makes them look stupid and out of touch. For 8 years the Bush administration ran up a deficit during a major boom time. Waging two wars is an actual example of broken window fallacy. Add up how many $30,000 bombs they dropped over the past 8 years, that is money gone, poof, borrowed from the tax payer, and now it’s gone. Leaving only a crater and some shell fragments.

So for you to be shocked and outraged that government wasted $25,000 to keep someone employed for a year makes you look like a giant tool.

If you could actually put things into context, and say, “holy shit, we’re in a recession and need to increase government spending domestically, let’s stop wasting in overseas” I’d have a lot more respect for your position.

In the end, your character speaks louder than your words.

I think most conservatives on this board do indeed think we need to stop “wasteful spending” overseas AND here at home. It is STILL wasteful.

[Finagle]

@Magiver

The next mystery is why it cost $25,000 per job.

I dunno – the math on that one doesn’t seem that hard. Here we have someone earning $25K/year who’s going to get laid off. Give the organization $25K. They can keep their job for at least a year, by which time hopefully economic stress will have eased up.

Actually, given overhead and the likelihood that most people are getting paid more than 25K/year, I’d be surprised if it was that cheap to preserve or create a job.

[Magiver]

@Finagle

I dunno – the math on that one doesn’t seem that hard. Here we have someone earning $25K/year who’s going to get laid off. Give the organization $25K. They can keep their job for at least a year, by which time hopefully economic stress will have eased up.

Actually, given overhead and the likelihood that most people are getting paid more than 25K/year, I’d be surprised if it was that cheap to preserve or create a job.

:smack: How many people are unemployed? This is not cost effective. Where do you think the money is coming from for this? Not from current tax revenue. It’s coming from China and future tax revenue.

[Gangster_Octopus]

@Finagle

I dunno – the math on that one doesn’t seem that hard. Here we have someone earning $25K/year who’s going to get laid off. Give the organization $25K. They can keep their job for at least a year, by which time hopefully economic stress will have eased up.

Actually, given overhead and the likelihood that most people are getting paid more than 25K/year, I’d be surprised if it was that cheap to preserve or create a job.

And it probably isn’t JUST for creating a job, I don’t know what it is for, exactly, but most of the money doesn’t just pay for a job.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Finagle

Here we have someone earning $25K/year who’s going to get laid off. Give the organization $25K. They can keep their job for at least a year, by which time hopefully economic stress will have eased up.

Not just that person, but the 2 or 3 others, via the multiplier effect, who depend on that job can keep their own too.

But then, to a Party Uber Alles type, a job created by a Democratic initiative can’t be “real” anyway. Explanations are wasted.

[Voyager]

The broken window fallacy, by the way, involves breaking the window to make work, not repairing windows broken from accidents or normal wear and tear. Considering that conservative policies broke the damn window in this case, it is particularly that conservatives bring it up. As Biden said, though more politely, the people who destroyed the economy should STFU about how to fix it.

[mswas]

@Voyager

The broken window fallacy, by the way, involves breaking the window to make work, not repairing windows broken from accidents or normal wear and tear. Considering that conservative policies broke the damn window in this case, it is particularly that conservatives bring it up. As Biden said, though more politely, the people who destroyed the economy should STFU about how to fix it.

Then please STFU, because Liberals pushed really hard to extend property ownership and that lead to the subprime mortgage crisis in the first place. The idea that the poor should be homeowners was a misplaced idea to begin with.

This whole ‘good guy/bad guy’ view of politics is for children, it’s beneath me, and it SHOULD BE beneath someone as smart as yourself.

[ElvisL1ves]

That was thirty years ago, for one thing, friend, and for another you can’t deny that home ownership has been part of The American Dream as espoused by virtually everyone for generations now.

You can STFU yourself about the “good guy / bad guy” stuff if you’re going to state that seriously.

[MOIDALIZE]

@mswas

Then please STFU, because Liberals pushed really hard to extend property ownership and that lead to the subprime mortgage crisis in the first place. The idea that the poor should be homeowners was a misplaced idea to begin with.

This whole ‘good guy/bad guy’ view of politics is for children, it’s beneath me, and it SHOULD BE beneath someone as smart as yourself.

It’s so beneath you that you decided to push the right-wing propaganda version of “mandatory loans to the poor caused the subprime crisis,” never mind the fact that the vast bulk of subprime loans made were not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act. Anyone who trots out this canard is strongly suspected of being completely full of shit in my mind.

[mswas]

@MOIDALIZE

It’s so beneath you that you decided to push the right-wing propaganda version of “mandatory loans to the poor caused the subprime crisis,” never mind the fact that the vast bulk of subprime loans made were not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act. Anyone who trots out this canard is strongly suspected of being completely full of shit in my mind.

Except that you are the one who trotted it out, not me.

The point is that it was an interleaving of various conflicting principles as a result of poorly implemented policies in the public sector and the private sector exacerbated by the partisan jockying for position that caused this. Trying to pin it on Republicans is silly. The President isn’t God-Emperor of the economy, as much as we like to think he is. Sure Bush fucked things up, but pretending that this wasn’t a lot longer in the making than just Bush doesn’t really accomplish anything.

Do you think that no Democrats were signing off on subprime mortgages as representatives of Countrywide? Do you think no Democrats were playing the house-flipping speculation game? Do you think no Democrats took subprime loans?

[MOIDALIZE]

@mswas

Except that you are the one who trotted it out, not me.

Really? So this line here:

Then please STFU, because Liberals pushed really hard to extend property ownership and that lead to the subprime mortgage crisis in the first place. The idea that the poor should be homeowners was a misplaced idea to begin with.

only appeared in my browser?

Also, I don’t blame President Bush for all of this, just as I don’t blame Obama for all the unemployment or praise Clinton for the tech boom. If anyone should be blamed, it’s people like Phil Gramm

[mswas]

@MOIDALIZE

Really? So this line here:

only appeared in my browser?

Also, I don’t blame President Bush for all of this, just as I don’t blame Obama for all the unemployment or praise Clinton for the tech boom. If anyone should be blamed, it’s people like Phil Gramm

Well I’m not big on single-cause blame games, but explain to me why Phil Gramm in particular is the cause of all this?
Look, I am not that knowledgeable on all this stuff, and I could be terribly wrong and maybe Liberals really are the good guys. But I see conflicting narratives for people’s favored economic religion. Liberals love to trot out the discrediting of Reaganomics by the recession whereas Conservatives are convinced it discredited Keynes.

I just find it mightily convenient how the recession just so happens to coincide with the descrediting of the opposing team’s economic principles.

Personally the way I lean on the issue is that partisan politics doesn’t end up with the best laws for everyone, but more likely the worst laws for everyone as the compromises end up being something that no one really wanted.

Bill Clinton presided over the most prosperous and one of the longest, “Yay money!”, periods in our history, the attitude of people that we were on top of the world and that we all needed to invest our wealth in speculatory instruments from house-flipping to stock investing. We created a world of E-Trade Kulaks who disconnected the investment of their capital from real world productivity, people zoned into video games like E-Trade and Ameritrade watching the data flow past without any real connection to the real people and real goods that the data represented.

I think it is that disconnection from the tangible impact of our actions that caused the mess we’re in now, and not any one particular direct action by political parties or individuals. Ender committed Xenocide unwittingly not even knowing that someone had put a gun in his hand until afterward.

[Voyager]

@mswas

Then please STFU, because Liberals pushed really hard to extend property ownership and that lead to the subprime mortgage crisis in the first place. The idea that the poor should be homeowners was a misplaced idea to begin with.

This whole ‘good guy/bad guy’ view of politics is for children, it’s beneath me, and it SHOULD BE beneath someone as smart as yourself.

No they didn’t. First, most of the major culprits in the subprime mortgage crisis were not subject to the CRA, so you cannot blame it for what Countryside did. Second, that act was in force for a long time before there was a crisis or subprime mortgages. Third, the CRA did not in any way require banks to make bad loans or loans without documentation. And fourth, one thing Bush did that was not responsible for the crisis was to support wider home ownership. I think there are plenty of reasons why this is a social good, but it does not involve selling balloon mortgages to people who will never be able to pay them back. Those who own are more connected to their community and in general more concerned about the upkeep of their property than those who rent.

Greenspan screwed up, but at least Greenspan admits it. Some Dems admit that they shouldn’t have been so quick to deregulate the banks. (And some are still in the pockets of bank lobbyists.) But the attitude that the crash was caused by them nasty gummint people and poor people, who walked into mortgage offices and demanded a subprime loan at gunpoint is exactly what I’m talking about.

[mswas]

Voyager And the attitude that it’s an either/or proposition is exactly what I am talking about. There is plenty of blame to go around. Bystander effect writ large.