Hope and Fail

More fuzzy math on jobs numbers

President Obama said during the State of the Union that 2 million more Americans would be out of work were it not for the Recovery Act:

Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. (Applause.) Two hundred thousand work in construction and clean energy; 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, first responders. (Applause.) And we’re on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.

The president’s advisers have had some trouble nailing down the number of jobs “saved or created” by the $787 billion stimulus — and Obama’s claim is just as troublesome.

The closest “official” estimate puts the number of jobs credited to the stimulus to between 600,000 and 1.6 million. And even those estimates aren’t solid. From the Associated Press:

The Congressional Budget Office has been much more guarded than Obama in characterizing the success of the stimulus plan. In November, it reported that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by between 600,000 and 1.6 million “compared with what those values would have been otherwise.” It said the ranges “reflect the uncertainty of such estimates.” And it added, “It is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.”

What’s more, AP reports that the administration said in December that 600,000 jobs could find their source in the stimulus. If that’s true, then according to the president, during the last month the Recovery Act magically created 1.4 million more jobs — but the unemployment rate remained the same at 10 percent.

As the Cato Institute puts it:

Cato Policy Analyst Tad Dehaven: “Actually, the U.S. economy has lost 2.7 million jobs since the stimulus passed and 3.4 million total since Obama was elected. How he attributes any jobs gains to the stimulus is the fuzziest of fuzzy math. ‘Nuff said.”

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