Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Congress / Kotz / Politics / Presidential Politics / The Economy Beware the Stimulus Package's Fake Job Stats
Posted by Pete Kotz on Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:21 PM
It's a go-to scam in all-Democratic Yankee towns like Chicago. So keep that in mind as President Obama boasts of job creation from the new stimulus package. Tennessee, says the White House, will receive 71,000 new jobs. And just so everyone can get in on the bragging, that figure's been conveniently broken down by congressional district, so even Marsha Blackburn can claim responsibility for 6,800 to 8,700 new jobs.
Problem is, these figures are always bullshit.
Cleveland, where I used to work, ran this scam to the point of unintentional hilarity. The new baseball/basketball stadium complex was supposed to create 27,000 news jobs. (It would have worked if the new Alice Cooper restaurant was generous enough to hire 12,000 cooks. Bastards.) Build a fancy new bus route through a burned-out part of town? That's 9,000 new jobs.
It became a running joke that everyone in Cleveland had 17 jobs. But somehow the city still still ranked as one of the poorest in the country. We never could figure that out.
Which poses a small problem for Obama. With the numbers he's promising, people will have a reasonable expectation of finding work. And when expectations rise, they have a natural way of falling back to Earth.
Comments (4)
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Aside from your Cleveland anecdote, where's your proof the jobs numbers are fake and bullshit?
Wouldn't surprise me if they are indeed somewhat exaggerated, but some real evidence to back up your claim would be helpful and possibly persuasive.
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The idea that government ever "creates" jobs - or anything else - is bullshit to begin with.
Government never "creates" anything.
All it does is redistribute wealth that has already been created by somebody else.
Since government has no resources to do anything with except that which it first taken away from somebody else, every dollar it spends is a dollar taken out of the private sector in one form or another.
Politicians like to engage in shell games where they claim they are "creating" X number of jobs with X amount of spending all the while deliberately ignoring the offsetting effect of that money not being spent or invested by all the private parties that would have had it if the government had not snatched it away from them.
