The great secret about President Obama’s stimulus bill is that it is not a stimulus bill. With only 12 cents on the dollar going to actual stimulating projects this bill is actually the biggest spending bill ever proposed in congress. And people wonder why Democrats are called tax and spend liberals. A close look at this bill is justification of that label.
One of the claims that then president-elect Obama claimed was that this stimulus bill would create 3 million jobs. This claim was later amended to the less aggressive claim that the bill would create or save 3 million jobs.
Now that has changed again because according to this article President Obama’s top economic adviser is admitting that there is “considerable uncertainty” in regards to any of Obama’s claims of job creation. And this is coming from the woman who created that number in the first place.
It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error,” they said. “There is the obvious uncertainty that comes from modeling a hypothetical package rather than the final legislation passed by the Congress. But, there is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity.
Let me sum up that statement for you.
President Obama had no real plan, that is evidenced by the phrase, “There is the obvious uncertainty that comes from modeling a hypothetical package”, he has to wait to see what congress sends him. There is a huge margin of error calculated into the number of jobs that would be created even though the administration promoted these numbers as facts, so in other words, either President Obama, or more likely Christina Romer, pulled these numbers out of his/her ass.
I think they can put these numbers right back where they came from.
Source..
