a dirty little secret... Jobs 'Created'

Jobs 'Created' -- The White House's Dirty Little Secret

By John Lott

- FOXNews.com | Updated December 03, 2009

The administration's measure of jobs "created or saved" uses a simple account rule: if the money is spent on a worker, this counts as a job created or saved. But this is naive.

The original $787 billion Stimulus was sold as a jobs bill. Today President Obama will host a "Jobs Summit" and Congress is moving towards passing a second stimulus package. But the first stimulus bill did not work, and there is little reason to believe that a second round will be any more successful.

During his weekly radio address on January 10, 2009, Obama promised that the economic stimulus' No. 1 goal was to create 3 to 4 million new jobs over the next two years: "Our first job is to put people back to work . . . ." He repeated this promise many times. Take his first press conference as president on February 10th, hereiterated the point: "I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving 4 million jobs. That's bottom line number one."

The administration made specific predictions about unemployment. For instance, on February 28th, 11 days after the stimulus bill passed, the Obama administration predicted that the national unemployment rate was going to average 8.1 percent this year and then decline to an average of 7.9 percent next year (see Table S-8).

Obviously, with the unemployment rate at 10.2 percent in October and rising, there is little change of those predictions coming to true. When you also include the unemployed who have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work or have only accepted a part-time job, the number is a staggering 17.5 percent, up from 13.9 percent in January. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey finds that 3.5 million jobs have been lost since February.

Now the administration wants to change why they passed the stimulus in the first place. Christina Romer, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal this past Tuesday: "The president's first task was to stop the economic free fall and stabilize financial markets." This is the same Christina Romer who warned on February 4th: “If we fail to act, we are likely to lose millions more jobs and the unemployment rate could reach double digits."

It is hard for the administration to argue with the worsening job numbers. But they cannot possibly swallow the idea that the stimulus was part of the problem, so they now argue that if the stimulus hadn't passed, the economy would be in even worse shape. Three and a half million jobs have been lost since February, yet the administration wants us to believe that, through the stimulus package, they "created or saved" 640,329 jobs, and that without the stimulus the total number of jobs lost would have been 4.1 million. FULL ARTICLE