It was kind of a no-win situation from the beginning: Calculate how many jobs the government stimulus package actually saved and/or created. It's impossible because it is trying to calculate one reality against another; it's trying to calculate one effect among many effects all mixed together. Nobody can know for sure what jobs were created (or saved) by the stimulus, and what jobs would have been created (or not lost) regardless.
It's like calculating how many accidents were prevented by putting up a stop sign at an intersection, or how many extra years you lived because you stopped smoking.
When the White House made specific numerical claims about how many jobs were created (no matter how accurate they tried to get it), the administration was just opening itself up to free shots from the opposition: You know damn well that it was a simple matter of going out and finding one or two jobs that the White House had counted as having been created by stimulus spending that were actually created regardless of stimulus spending, and the opposition would be able to dismiss the entire count as ridiculously inaccurate and untrustworthy. Of course, the opposition went out and found thousands of examples of innaccuracy, just to drive the point home.
So what is the White House going to do now? Just count every job that is directly suppoted by stimulus money. Good idea in a way: It takes away the single argument the opposition was using: "No it didn't" regarding whether or not the stimulus money helped in particular instances.
But, of course, going from the imaginary number of "jobs created" to the real number of "jobs supported" is just sophistry... or a really big straw man, depending on your point of view. You can't say it is "moving the goal posts" though, unless you are implying that the goal posts are now on a completely different playing field.
Anyway, the White House backed themselves into this political zugzwang by trying to promise God-like insight into "what might have been" from their bean counters. They should just admit, "the stimulus helped because A, B, and C are better... and X, Y, and Z, which might have happened actually did not... and that's all we are sure of."
All i think the stimulus did was give the guys that run the printing press some overtime. Thats the main measurable thing that it did.
ReplyDeleteOh, I don't doubt that the stimulus helped the economy at all. Of course it did. The question is whether the $700 billion or whatever it was provided a $700 billion boost or a $200 billion boost, and what the economy would have done without it.
ReplyDeleteAnd, as is the point of this post, that question is generally (and most especially specifically) unanswerable.