Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 6:32:31 PM
Obama’s Faith-Based Economics [Brian Riedl]
On the stimulus’s first anniversary, keep in mind one number: 6.3 million.
That is the Obama jobs gap — the difference between the 3.3 million net jobs President Obama said would be created (not just saved) and the 3 million additional net jobs that have since been lost.
By the president’s own logic, the stimulus failed. So
Obama has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he now
says, but without the stimulus it would have lost nearly 2 million more
jobs.
This “it would have been
worse” theory is completely unprovable. No one knows how the economy
would have performed without the stimulus.
Furthermore,
it’s faith-based economics. The White House’s new estimates of “saving”
nearly 2 million jobs are not based on observations of the economy’s
recent performance. Rather, they are based on the Obama
administration’s unshakable belief that deficit spending must create
jobs and growth. Specifically, the White House’s “proof” that the
stimulus created jobs is an economic model that they programmed to
assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs.
How’s that for circular logic?
The
idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you
never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the
sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by
first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is
created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.
The
White House says the $300 billion spent from the stimulus thus far has
financed as many as 2 million jobs. Maybe. However, the private sector
now has $300 billion less to spend, which, by the same logic, means it
must lose the same number of jobs, leaving a net employment impact of
zero. But the White House’s single-entry bookkeeping simply ignores
that side of the equation.
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