Saving or Creating False Results

It was announced this week that President Obama would expedite stimulus spending to help our economy. However, the President has already began touting that his stimulus spending and actions have "saved or created" 150,000 US jobs.

This has become the President's catch phrase for what his stimulus is doing for America. In his most recent address this week, the President plans to expedite stimulus spending to "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs in addition to the 150,000 mentioned above. That's 750,000 estimated jobs! President Obama's goal for the recovery plan is to "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years". What an ambitious leader!

So that's the news we've been hearing from the media this past week. "Save and Create" has captured the hearts and minds of the American people and President Obama has emerged as the FDR of today's generation.

Except he hasn't. This standard, "save and create" is fiction. There is simply no way to measure how many jobs have been "saved" from stimulus spending. No one measures jobs saved; not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Greg Mankiw, a former Bush economic advisor, calls this term a "non-measurable metric". Here's why: You can measure job growth or losses between two points in time.

Tell me, how would you even begin to measure how many jobs have been saved? You can't. No one can. Not even the scholars know why the President has decided to use this term, well, all the scholars that are rooted in fact and metrics. Even the New York Times, one of the most blatantly liberal newspapers, has noted that Obama's claims are "...based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs".

The political scientists of the world think it's an act of political genius. President Obama has managed to create a metric where he cannot be wrong. And the worst part is, the media has yet to question it. The reason why? They swoon on every comment he makes and take it as the Liberal Gospel. So much for acting as a watchdog on government, right?

Even members of his own party are disturbed by his metrics. During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula. He was quoted as saying, "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say... it would've lost 5.5 million jobs... You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

How does this work? Let me give you an example. Here is where we are at today. Since the passing of the stimulus, we have lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment hit 9.4% (but Obama told us that passing the stimulus would result in unemployment not exceeding 8%). So given how bad this period was, President Obama has instead spun the situation and claimed he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. Pretty good spin in my opinion. But I don't want to get too dizzy. That was just a small one. If we end up hitting 15% unemployment and lose 2.5 million jobs, will the President insist that had it not been for his actions, we would have surely lost 7 million jobs, thus saving 4.5 million American jobs? He can; using this measure at least.

Something is wrong when the President is using a formula that is pure fiction. It presents a double-standard because had former President Bush used the same measure, he would have surely been hounded by the media. Tony Fratto, a successful and well respected communication analyst who worked for the Bush administration has even stated, "You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama's jobs claims that they did toward President Bush's tax cuts", but this has not been the case.

I remember studying the liberal media in college and thinking to myself, 'Surely it's not that bad'. Well I was wrong. I thank my lucky stars that there are conservative media outlets available out there because the press is supposed to act as a government watchdog. When the liberal media is too busy swooning over the President, some things (the things that often matter) are left to slip through the cracks. Whether or not you dislike a particular media outlet (or all media outlets) that are slanted opposite of your political ideology, they serve as a vital component of our government. I would be a fool to think they are always righteous in their pursuits because sometimes they can also take things a little too far or not perform as they should.