Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, November 04, 2009 4:00:47 PM
I admire the WSJ (the editorial staff more than the news staff), but
this article is absurd. They first, rightly, point out there is no way to count "jobs saved". In fact, there really is no way to tell how many jobs were "created due to the stimulus" either, as opposed to just created, but let us ignore that for the moment. But as soon as they point this out, they claim there is a miscount in Obama's "saved or created" numbers. Well, if they are absurd made up numbers, how can they be right or wrong? As the title says, can we have a "miscount" in the number of dragons and fairies?
Worse still, the Obama administration pretty much admits the numbers ar emade up. See this quote:
Ed DeSeve, the senior adviser to President Barack Obama on
implementation of the stimulus plan, said Tuesday in a statement
responding to questions from the Journal that the administration knew
the reports were not "100 percent accurate" but that the plan was
supposed "to create jobs, not count them." He said that even the
"approximate" total pointed to "tremendous progress."
Yet, even after both sides admit the numbers are fictions, they proceed to argue over them. Why? I think in some ways this is a practical example of what I describe in "
Bad Economics Part 4", the economic obsession with numbers, even when those numbers are known to be meaningless.Economists seem so obsessed with econometrics they would rather take meaningless numbers than admit something cannot be quantified.
But that is bad, as it lends credence to the Obama claims to know the number of jobs "saved or created", when in reality there is as little way of knowing that as there is of knowing how many jobs were not created due to the inflation and borrowing which funded the bailout. All is speculation. In these cases, no matter what the econometrics wonks claim, we have to fall back on theory and say, whatever the claims, the best the government can do to create jobs is get out of the way.