The created or saved scam

Joseph Lawler:

It is hard to reconcile Friday’s dismal Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report with Vice President Joe Biden’s claim from the previous Friday that "the Recovery Act is operating as advertised." The BLS related the news that almost 200,000 more jobs were lost in the past month - the 14th consecutive month with losses in the hundreds of thousands - and that the unemployment rate now stands at 10.2 percent. Despite the barrage of terrible employment figures, don’t expect the administration to back off its bold claim that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is on pace to deliver its promised year-end 1 million jobs "created or saved."

The Obama Administration has demonstrated a knack for clever grammatical constructions, and "created or saved" might be the most artful. By using jobs saved and not just jobs created as the measuring stick, the administration is able to trumpet eye-catchingly large numbers - as attested by the Biden’s triumphal pronouncement that $160 billion of spending had already created or saved almost 650,000 jobs.

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There's a problem, though: the "created or saved" numbers are meaningless. The administration purposefully devised the metric to be nebulous. Without a counterfactual, showing the trend of unemployment in the absence of the stimulus, it is impossible to know how many jobs the stimulus saved. That is why the administration can get away with claiming that it has saved hundreds of thousands of jobs even when employment is three million jobs below what the president's Council of Economic Advisers had predicted it would be without the stimulus, and the unemployment rate is higher than it has been since 1983.

The administration can elude blame by claiming that the recession turned out to be deeper than anticipated, and that conditions would have been even worse without the stimulus. Obama and company have have rigged the game: they could claim the stimulus is "operating as advertised" no matter what, even if employment actually dipped to 1 million total this year - after all, they could say that every last job would have vanished without their intervention.

In what must have been a moment of unusual candor, Jared Bernstein, Biden's chief economic adviser who is tasked with overseeing the stimulus's implementation, admitted to Time that "[y]ou can't answer these questions without a compared-to-what.... We can have good arguments about the baseline, but a critique that doesn't evoke the baseline is useless." The cat is out of the bag.

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This is just another element of the Democrat politics of fraud. They know it is a fraud too.

When Biden says the stimulus is working as advertised he is flatly contradicted by their own projections of where the unemployment numbers would be now with the passage of the stimulus. Even arguing it would be worse with out it is speculative.