Rosie O’Donnell is America’s favorite pinup girl. Al Sharpton really does care about justice for all. Nancy Pelosi is the nation’s most trusted politician. Barack Obama doesn’t believe in big government.
How many times would you have to read those lines before you started believing they were true? Most of you would sooner shove a serrated ice pick into your retina.
Still, there comes a point – for some – when sheer repetition trumps reality. There is a time when repeating something over and over becomes so familiar to those within earshot that it is simply accepted or believed.
Take our President, for example.
Whatever land he is living in must currently be cracking down, because the rational are being detained at the border.
Once again, Bammy is talking up the success of his stimulus bill, going on about how many jobs have been “saved” or “created.” Once again, the President is repeating something that is, at the very least, impossible to substantiate, and at most, a catastrophic fraud.
In his case, reality has already been trumped.
Jake Tapper from ABC News writes:
President Obama veered off script – and away from the facts – when he spoke about the stimulus bill today in Nashua, NH.
“Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment,” the president said. “But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, 7 million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.”
Um, it’s not true that “every economist” has said the Recovery Act has saved or created two million jobs.
What have some of them said?
The chair of his Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer wrote last month that “The CEA estimates that as of the fourth quarter of 2009, the ARRA has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by 1½ to 2 million.”
In her blog she wrote “approximately 2 million people are employed who otherwise would not be, because of the Act.”
At the end of November, Congressional Budget office Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote that because of the stimulus bill “in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States..”
But clearly other economists are much more skeptical, including Dan Mitchell at the libertarian Cato Institute, and J.D. Foster at The Heritage Foundation.
Some economists say the whole notion of counting “saved or created” jobs is impossible. Harvard University labor economist Lawrence Katz told ProPublica that trying to count how many jobs have been saved or created is “a silly exercise.”
And in fact, in December the Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag issued a directive scrapping the whole “saved or created” construct.
So, there are no economists anywhere who have not bought into this hogwash?
None?
Just like there are no scientists who refute the perils of man-made global warming?
The same thinking that has me wondering why anyone would trust the government to handle health care reform when they couldn’t handle already existing government programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, also has me asking why anyone in their right mind would trust anything the administration is saying about jobs being “saved” when they had such a perplexing time making sure that the districts receiving stimulus cash actually existed.
The entire stimulus recovery angle is a myth – much like the “climate change” hoax, or the “most transparent administration in history” garbage.
There are endless stories out there on how the “saved” and “created” criteria were painfully flawed.
Recall that entire zip codes didn’t exist, yet jobs were miraculously created or saved there.
Also keep in mind that the vast majority of these “saved jobs” were government jobs, so the entire premise, even if true, is misleading.
And yet, the President and his chums will keep saying “two million jobs” over and over again until it morphs into conventional wisdom. With bed fellows like the mainstream media, it’s only a matter of time before two million becomes two-and-a-half million. Then, it’ll be rounded up to three million. Before July 4th, the President will have saved or created twenty-eight million new jobs. The only reason there will be any unemployed at that point will be the fault of George W. Bush.
It’ll be repeated so often, it will become “true.”
Well, not here.
It’s all a crock of boiling excrement.
Period.
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Roman Around 