Jobs

[NBVegita]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124451592762396883.html

 

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.

 

During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula.

 

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," said the Montana Democrat. "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

 

I do have to say that I not only agree that the president is making a bogus claim on this matter, but also with the assertion in the article that this never would have flown under the Bush administration. It appears that as it was trendy to tear apart every aspect of the Bush administration it is equally as trendy to allow things to slide past the microscope on Obama's administration.

 

I feel the media needs to be a bit less bias.

 

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

 

If Bush had done the same thing a year ago, you couldn't find a news outlet not reporting on it. Ironically I bet this post will be the first most of you have heard of this, heck this article was the first I'd heard/seen published.

 

Just to clarify, I'm not so much attacking the Obama administration, although I hate when people mislead you, I'm more so attacking the bias of the media.

[»Lynx]

It's true, but back when Bush started, he was high on the opinion ratings too - just wait for the glamour to wear off before the press start becoming more cynical in their posts.

 

-L

[FMBI]

Believe it or not, I would take that more seriously if I hadn't heard the same exact thing from the "dirty dozen" of fascist republicans (Phil Gingrey, Michelle Bachman, etc) who get on C-SPAN every night and repeat the latest party talking points. Talking points. And that's all this is. Are there problems with the numbers themselves? Yes. But when these attacks are coming from people who take Keynes' famous "coal mine" comment at face value (or pretend to, anyway) and repeat the old bullshit line about "Even FDR's top people said the New Deal wasn't working..." (never mind the return to recession when government spending was cut, eh?), it is really hard to take it as anything more than a pathetic, inferior brand of the same politics Obama's playing. He's lying a little; they're stretching the truth more than an obese cross-dresser in pair of Size-0 panties.

 

And, even more idiotically: That part about "If Bush had said the same thing..."? That's just random shit thrown in to help restore the Republican brand by equating Obama and Bush. We know that Bush (and his administration in general) lied about hundreds (or thousands) of things and broke hundreds of laws (with some changed to give retroactive immunity: hello, wiretaps!); we can't say the same about Obama. Comparing an occasional drinker to the town drunk is nonsense, and so is this.

 

Finally: Lynx, take a look at Bush's approval ratings again. By the middle of his first year, he was heading south faster than a Canadian retiree; the only thing that saved him was his own incompetence by allowing 9/11 to go forward. If the twin towers hadn't gone down, then he probably would've hit his 2008-levels of approval within two years. Whereas Obama is on track to maintain ~60s all the way to the mid-terms, especially if H1N1 comes back big time in the fall (as I - and, of course, the WHO - fear).

Edited June 10, 2009 by Finland My BorgInvasion

[NBVegita]

Lol so because a republican says a statement, true or not, it is worth nothing, simply because it's from a republican? Well I always knew you thought that way it just about time you actually said it!!!

 

Heck even Baucus sees a problem with it.

 

He's not lying a little, he's making up a fictitious number to try to defend his ludicrous stimulus package that isn't worth the paper it's printed on, let alone the nearly one trillion dollars it's spending. To go along with that, what in that article is the author stretching?

 

Comparing an occasional drinker to the town drunk is nonsense, and so is this.

 

There is a big difference between giving someone the benefit of the doubt and doing what our media is doing. Hell the national media makes more love to Obama than his own wife does.

 

And I agree with you Lynx. The problem with Obama is going to be when the rubber needs to meet the road. As of now he hasn't needed to actually do anything, and short of exploding our budget even more, he hasn't.

[FMBI]

Lol so because a republican says a statement, true or not, it is worth nothing, simply because it's from a republican? Well I always knew you thought that way it just about time you actually said it!!!

 

No. As I said, it came from the fascists (and in this case, the term isn't just for smear value; I suggest you google some of Bachmann's bizarre and way-off-in-right-field statements), and therefore, it deserves very little consideration. While theoretically this is a logical fallacy ("poisoning the well," I believe?), it tends to work out pretty well when you're dealing with politics. There are quite a few people on both sides of the debate who, in a perfect (and/or totalitarian) world would be banned from the airwaves for constantly spewing bullshit. However, I do admit to a slight partisan bias in this regard for the simple reason that there are a lot more Palins than Pelosis in this world.

 

Heck even Baucus sees a problem with it.

 

Baucus is a joke. ^_^

 

He's not lying a little, he's making up a fictitious number to try to defend his ludicrous stimulus package that isn't worth the paper it's printed on, let alone the nearly one trillion dollars it's spending. To go along with that, what in that article is the author stretching?

 

The number isn't wholly fictitious, because we've already seen studies saying that some jobs have been "created or saved." Not very many so far, but it's started to ramp up quite quickly as the various parts of the stimulus hit the economy. So even if the number he's quoting isn't true right now, it probably will be in a few weeks. Therefore, it's a relatively small lie. The people opposing him on this, on the other hand, are basically saying the number is completely made up. Which it isn't; just exaggerated. And they're also conveniently overlooking enough other points on related issues that it's hard not to see a pattern.

 

Comparing an occasional drinker to the town drunk is nonsense, and so is this.

 

There is a big difference between giving someone the benefit of the doubt and doing what our media is doing. Hell the national media makes more love to Obama than his own wife does.

 

Sigh. The media is not nearly as lovey-dovey with Obama as everybody (including the media) says it is. Take a look back at the coverage of Reagan and GW Bush; if the media's making love to Obama, they were bending over for those two. Obama's gotten a pretty good reception, but that's mainly due to the fact that he's putting out twenty million statements a day (give or take a few). Political flooding is nothing new, and once the effect starts to wear off, the press generally starts to grow claws. In a few more months, when Gibbs's endless laughing starts to grate, look for press coverage that will be as bad as Bush's in his second term.

 

And I agree with you Lynx. The problem with Obama is going to be when the rubber needs to meet the road. As of now he hasn't needed to actually do anything, and short of exploding our budget even more, he hasn't.

 

First of all, on the debt: Oops. If I hear one more person trot out the "OBAMA IS DOING NOTHING BUT RAISE THE DEBT" line, I think I'll consider going postal. Or at least running around squirting toothpaste at people.

 

As far as the rest of his actions: Obama's dealt with more in his term so far than pretty much anyone. The problem is that each issue only stayed in the news for a week, so everybody's already forgotten. Hyper-ADHD, it would seem. But here's a quick list off the top of my head:

 

Doubling troops in Afghanistan (dumb move, but he did do it, heh)

Committing to pull troops out of Iraq (mostly.. kinda.. maybe.. but on the other hand, pretty much)

Shutting Guantanamo (Well, you know... Until 94 retards voted not to transfer prisoners from a maximum security facility in Cuba to maximum security facilities in the US)

Going up against carbon emissions and/or encouraging clean energy (halfway there, anyway)

Healthcare reform (watered down, and it's still gotta get through the legislative process, but the smart money's on October, right where he's putting it)

Completely shifting the geopolitical stance of the US in relation to the Muslim world (no caveats, this time )

Taking on the military-industrial complex (symbolically, if not actually)

 

Now, as you may have noticed, only one of those is listed without some major side-notes, and even that's going to take time to work fully: but the point is that he's "gotten the ball rolling" on a ton of major issues that have been conveniently ignored for years, or even decades, by other presidents. Clean energy, for instance, has been sitting on the sidelines since Carter got voted out; Guantanamo should have been shut 2 years ago when Bush promised he was going to; Healthcare reform famously should have been delivered in 93; etc. By the end of Obama's first term, he'll have put more rubber on the road than any presidents except Lincoln and FDR. And I can guarantee you that he'll do it without his approval going below 40%, probably never going below 50. Why? Because, despite the extreme stupidity of the American voter, he's managed to make his presidency about fixing all the problems everyone else skipped over. Even if he only delivered 20% of what he promised, he'd still get re-elected; as it is, he'll probably deliver on virtually everything. All he has to do in 4 years is run another campaign infomercial and say "I did......this......and this.......and this............" and he'll make 84 look like a close election.

 

[NBVegita]

[FMBI]

Heh, I typed out a really massive post, but it's 1 in the morning and I don't have time to check it for errors (sticking 3 posts, with tons of quotes / text formats together, kinda sucks. )

 

I'll put it here in the morning.

 

 

-PLACE HOLDER-

[Bak]

787 billion / $50,000/year = 15 million jobs for one year

 

you could also look at the infrastructure projects and see how many ppl are working on them

 

also you could look at unemployment projections from 6 months ago and from now and consider the difference to be jobs saved or created, unless you're saying unemployment projections are completely random and have no scientific methodology to them

 

point is, it's not an impossible thing to estimate jobs saved

[NBVegita]

First problem with your equation is that only about half of that money is going to create new jobs, approx 400 billion. So your number would at best be ~8 billion. Second you would have to assume that all if the money has been spent creating those jobs, most of it, although allocated to do so, has not actually been spent.

 

Again I've never argued that you cannot state a number of jobs created, as you can directly record the number of positions your administration personally created.

 

That's the problem with these numbers. Directly from one of the paragraphs above, no matter what the unemployment rate jumps to, even a number that they swore their package would prevent, they simply use the age old "Well it would have been much worse" argument, which is the same lame argument that Cheney has be blathering about concerning national security.

 

Ultimately I disagree, I find it impossible to get even a solid estimate of jobs saved. Short of if a company states it's going to lay off X people, the government gives them money and now they say they don't have to lay off X people. Then on the inverse side you look at the fact that even with stimulus help GM just lost a large amount of employees, which I personally agree with as bad as it is. Again you're in a political speculation because an economist aligned with you could try to massage the data to show great numbers saved and an economist against you can massage the numbers in the opposite direction. Ultimately you've got a number that is wholly unmeasurable and is based, short of the jobs created off speculation. Definitely not a number a president should be touting to defend his "wonderful" stimulus package, unfortunately it's the only number he can make look positive right now.