Peter Suderman’s article on why we cannot trust CBO estimates concerning the value of the stimulus is a must-read:
Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) most recent report on the matter estimates the stimulus’ effects were in the fourth quarter of 2009: Thanks to the stimulus, America is somewhere between 1 and 2.1 million jobs richer than it would have been with no government intervention. Federal dollars have fattened up our GDP as well, adding somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 percent to the GDP.
Naturally, the Obama administration is keen to take credit. And in touting the CBO’s stimulus figures, the White House repeatedly employed the phrase “created or saved.” After widespread eye-rolling at such an obvious rhetorical gimmick—not to mention significant evidence that many of the jobs it was claiming credit for were not, in fact, created or saved—the administration altered its lingo and started referring to jobs “funded.” But this too is not as accurate as it could be, at least in the context of the CBO’s reports; a better phrase might have been “created or saved or estimated or assumed.”
February 23, 2010 – 11:01 am
Paul Krugman is a very fine macroeconomist and cat lover who moonlights as a political polemicist at the New York Times. He has a very big megaphone, which means that he doesn’t need to sweat coherence.
February 19, 2010 – 1:43 am
It’s time for your weekly dose of markets and politics with Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, a podcast brought to you by the fine folks at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com, your new home for Conservative podcasts. In this week’s edition, we celebrate the anniversary of the stimulus, unpack the ramifications of the financial meltdown in Europe, and hash out the realities of America’s jobless future.
February 17, 2010 – 11:37 am
Federal deficit spending in a recession is supposed to create jobs, but it never does. At best, it provides some stopgap demand until the private-sector economy rebounds on its own. Don’t let Paul Krugman, channeling Keynes, tell you that the public demand itself is what actually produces the recovery.
February 1, 2010 – 10:19 am
Public deficit spending isn’t going to stimulate private credit formation and consumption-growth until consumers get their balance sheets healed. People who want you to think that a much bigger stimulus last year would have magically fixed the economy are deeply deluded. Or deeply mendacious.
January 13, 2010 – 9:56 am
China is in the midst of what amounts to probably the biggest, fastest Keynesian stimulus ever attempted. Keynes basically believed that all demand is equal, and you could create useful economic activity by paying people even to do useless things. That’s exactly what China is doing.
November 23, 2009 – 9:26 am
Black Friday predictions run from pessimistic to disastrous, negative interest rates worry the markets, and the New York Times makes ridiculous claims about the success of the stimulus. We discuss all this and more on today’s Coffee and Markets.
November 18, 2009 – 9:58 am
The Democrat leadership in Washington is terrified that people will start blaming them for historically high unemployment levels, despite their best efforts to create or save jobs in Texas District 85 and elsewhere.
October 29, 2009 – 11:08 pm
It is nice that the press is paying attention to the degree to which the number of stimulus jobs has been overstated by the Obama Administration. But more media outlets need to flood the zone on this issue.
September 8, 2009 – 9:25 am
Today’s Coffee and Markets podcast focuses on what the next few months will bring for the stock market, the upcoming corporate earnings reports, China’s economy, and the limits of stimulus — global recovery, or questionable path?
