If you watched the President’s prime time news conference Wednesday night, you probably heard him claim that the stimulus plan has already “saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” Right. Thankfully, FactCheck.org blew the whistle on him.
Fantasy Jobs?
By Jess Henig May 1st, 2009
FactCheck.orgAt President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” Wait a minute. Isn’t the number of jobs actually plummeting?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost more than 1.3 million jobs in the two months after he took office, and it has probably lost at least another half-million in April. The day after Obama spoke, the Department of Labor announced that another 631,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) had filed new claims for unemployment insurance the previous week.
So what 150,000 jobs was Obama talking about?
It turns out the president’s claim is really an estimate of what his economic advisers think the stimulus bill is doing, and not based on any evidence of its actual effects.
We asked the White House for substantiation of Obama’s claim, and a spokesman responded that the figure comes from a recent estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Because the baseline for employment is obviously still strongly downward,” the spokesman told us, “the estimate does not mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 higher than it otherwise would have been.” He said the figure is an estimate of people hired to work directly on ARRA-funded projects, plus “jobs created by the tax cuts, aid to the states, and other parts of the ARRA.”
So when the president said his stimulus bill “already saved or created” those jobs, he was just giving an estimate produced by his own economic advisers at the White House. Furthermore, the jobs figure is based on projections done at the time ARRA was passed. Recipients of ARRA spending aren’t required to report until later what they’re doing with the money and how well it’s working, so there’s very little hard data on where the money is being spent, let alone how many jobs may have resulted from the legislation. The CEA incorporated some actual spending reports into its estimate, but that information is not complete.
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Fantasy for him, nightmare for us.
It’s Obama-math. He always wins.
Socialism sucks. While small to midsize businesses (the employers of 90% of Americans) sit waiting it out and the Obama administration gets more and more desperate to take our tax dollars and bully or demonize the captialist we’re all just getting deeper into this nightmare. Without money we have little power. I hope it doesn’t take much longer for people to wake up.
By: texangal on May 4, 2009
at 4:41 pm
When he spoke today, he said all that was lost in the market crash last fall really didn’t matter because those were ‘usery profits’ or some such phrase…but the word WAS usery. THAT got my goat. We lost nearly 50% of our savings….and it was not ‘unreal’ money…which is how he meant it…. HAD we managed to withdraw that money before the crash, it would have been VERY REAL $$$….but his statement acted like none of us should care about losing it because it was all so over inflated it just wasn’t a real amount. I want the government out of my face….and let me keep my money that I worked hard to earn. Not one dime has been given to me by anyone. Let me decide how useless it is or whether I should feel bad when I’ve lost nearly 50% of it. I am 65….and stand no chance of making it back…NOR do we in our house want to be beholden to the government for any handouts beyond social security and medicare….not ever…. so we’ll leave the government alone and request that they leave us alone.
By: JoAnne Schnepp on May 5, 2009
at 2:15 am